Question

Module 04 Discussion - Dietary Concerns of Older Adults

Discuss dietary concerns and barriers for an older adult to maintain appropriate nutrition levels. Identify the types of concerns and barriers they may encounter. Include two health promotion interventions for prevention of nutritional deficits as well as the consequences of inadequate nutrition and hydration.

Please make an initial post by midweek, and respond to at least two other student's posts with substantial details that demonstrate an understanding of the concepts and critical thinking. Remember that your posts must exhibit appropriate writing mechanics including using proper language, cordiality, and proper grammar and punctuation. If you refer to any outside sources or reference materials, be sure to provide proper attribution and/or citation.

Answer 1

Dietary concern of elderly people is a topic that is oftenly overlooked and lacks awareness.Some of the barriers faced by the elderly people leading to nutritional deficits are as follows.

1.Poverty:Most elderly people survive on meagre pension scheme which hardly allows them to have sufficient calorific food items.

2.Lack of knowledge/awareness:Lack of awareness about calorific requirements or nutritional demands is one of the most important barrier.This is due to lack of   proper educational problems involving older people.Most healthcare facilities just do the normal routine tests as part of health checkup plan.Health talks with the aged never happen.The aged community also tend to keep themself unavailable if such programmes ever happen.Most healthcare personnel cited that recruiting aged people for such programmes is itself a hard task.

3.Lack of appetite:This is due to the low basal metabolic rate.The calorific value of aged person also decreases and varies from 1600-2000 cal/day.Also the lack of exercise or an active lifestyle diminishes their hunger.

4.Decreased bowel movement:Most aged person face loss of teeth.So they tend to avoid fibrous diet which leads to constipation and haemorrhoids and makes defecation very painful.Also they tend to avoid vegetables in fear of forming gas or indigestion as their activity level is very low.

5.Chronic illness like Diabetes,hypertension,renal failure,cardiac disorder have put most aged people on a restricted diet. I n fear of indigestion or falling sick they tend to omit basic essentials in their diet.

Two health interventions for dietary concern of senior adults are:

1.Spreading awareness and educating the aged by organizing health programmes concerning them can be useful.In this programmes healthgivers can advise them to a moderate active lifestyle including some easy exercise or walking. We should also make sure they take knowledge about nutrition and seek diet plan from their physician keeping their illness in mind.To increase their appetite apart from advising exercise, the aged can take smoothies of green veggie or fruits to counteract lose of teeth or tongue ulcer.This will remove constipation ..

2.Secondly ,the community /government should make sure low cost healthcare and pension schemes provide healthcare at affordable prices for the aged.There should be geriatric care centres near old aged communities so that these people can be taken care of .

These are only few of the concerns and interventions that the aged people face and we can take as a measure.We should be sure that these aged people who once served our community should be looked after well too in their old age.