Senior Health: 3 Fun Ways To Get Seniors Interested in Cooking Healthy Meals

Senior Health: Did you know that some studies estimate as many as 50% of seniors are malnourished?

Seniors often don’t eat enough to sustain themselves because they have trouble shopping for food, because they are worried about money, or because they have trouble cooking. Seniors also may not be able to get all vitamins and minerals they need from the foods they eat because some medications can interfere with the body’s ability to process and break down food. Senior Health should be a consideration at this time.

Senior Health: Healthy Cooking

It’s very important to make sure that your senior loved one is eating enough and eating healthy foods.

Home care providers are a fantastic resource to get your senior parent to eat more. Home care providers help seniors prepare meals and provide company and engagement during meals. If you are trying to get your senior parent to cook healthy meals or to eat regularly again here are some fun ways that you or a home care provider can get your senior parents cooking:

Cook Your Way Through A New Cookbook

Has your parent always loved a particular type of cuisine? Or maybe they always wanted to learn to cook a certain way. Buy a cookbook full of recipes from that cuisine and cook your way through the book together. You and your parent or their home care provider can choose a new meal to try every day until you get all the way through the book and then you can buy a new book and start again. If there are special ingredients required a home care provider can make sure that those ingredients get purchased.

Senior Health: Make A Cookbook

If you had a parent who was the primary cook in the house and made dinner every day throughout your childhood you can create a cookbook with that parent. Writing down the recipes and the stories attached to the recipes will be a great activity for your senior loved one and then you can cook the meals together to make sure that the recipes are correct. Once you have tried every recipe you can have the book printed and give it to friends and family for a holiday gift as part of the family legacy.

Senior Health: Make It a Competition

Cooking competitions are fun to watch but they’re even more fun to participate in. If your parent loves watching cooking and baking shows on TV host your cooking competition show. You can choose a special ingredient that you both have to use in your dish. Or you can create an entire multi-course meal that must incorporate the ingredient in each course. You may also want to challenge yourself and your parent by having the home care provider create a basket of wacky ingredients and then each of you must use the basket ingredients to cook with. The winner gets bragging rights and maybe a small prize of some kind. Cooking competitions are a fantastic way to get your senior loved one to try new healthy foods that they haven’t tried before. Good senior health is important.

If you or an aging loved one is considering hiring Home Care in North Fork, NY, call the caring staff at Artful Home Care today at 631-685-5001.

Source:
https://acl.gov/news-and-events/acl-blog/combatting-senior-malnutrition