Page 79 - NACC – 2018 Yearbook

Recipes
SOUND ADVICE FROM ALISON SMITH, PRESCRIBING
SUPPORT DIETITIAN FOR THE NHS
“The standard healthy-eating messages that we’re all familiar with (low fat, low sugar, low salt, 5-a-day etc.) are healthy for most of the adult population, where the focus is on prevention of long-term health problems like heart disease and diabetes. However, for people aged over about 80, we need to focus much more on ‘eating for health’, rather than ‘healthy eating’. And, ‘eating for health’ is all about preventing unplanned weight loss and reducing risk of malnutrition, not about preventing long-term health problems.
In care homes for older people, ‘eating for health’ is likely to apply to residents who are not at risk of malnutrition. However, for those residents identified as malnourished/at risk of malnutrition (using a correctly completed Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST), for example), ‘food first’ and ‘food fortification/enrichment’ are likely to be needed to help meet their nutritional needs.
A lot of people tend to think of ‘food first’ as just being about adding butter or cream to food, however, residents at risk of malnutrition are likely to need more than just extra calories (which is really all that butter and cream add). It’s therefore really important to ensure that our ‘food first’ efforts add more than just calories and include protein and a range of vitamins and minerals as well. Great cost-effective and widely available fortification/enrichment alternatives include skimmed milk powder, ground nuts, nut butters, cheese and Greek yoghurt.”