This month is a good time for you and your loved one’s senior home care providers to look at your senior loved one’s diet to see where they can make some healthy changes. According to research nearly 30% of seniors over 60 are obese, and an even greater number are overweight. By swapping out some of the traditional desserts that your senior loved one likes with healthier options your senior parent may be able to get healthy and shed some pounds. Extra weight can be a real problem for seniors because it increases their risk of many major health problems like high cholesterol and heart disease.
If your loved one has a sweet tooth and loves desserts having a senior home care provider there to help cook meals and share meals with your senior loved one can help your senior parent eat healthier and improve portion sizes. When people eat alone they tend to overeat, so having a senior home care provider to share meals with can have a big impact on your senior loved one’s diet.
These healthy substitutions and swaps can also have a healthy impact on your senior loved one’s diet:
Bake With Whole Wheat Flour
Instead of baking cookies, cakes, pie crusts, and other baked goods with white flour use wheat flour instead. Wheat flour has more fiber and the added fiber can help lower the risk of some types of cancers while also helping digestive health. Just remember that whole wheat flour is denser than other types of flour so you will only need about ¾ of a cup of wheat flour to equal one cup of white flour. You can also substitute coconut flour for white flour because coconut flour is very high in protein. Increasing the amount of protein in the dessert will help your senior loved one be full with a smaller serving of the dessert and they will stay full for longer too.
Cut The Sugar In Half
If your senior loved one loves sugar you can make desserts a little healthier by cutting the amount of sugar in half in most recipes. Most foods don’t need the high amounts of sugar in the recipe, especially if you’re using ingredients that may already have sugar added to them like pie fillings or puddings. Your senior loved one probably won’t even notice that the dessert isn’t quite so sweet but they will be a lot healthier when they are only consuming half the sugar they were eating before.
Keep It Simple
Simple desserts can be just as tasty as complicated ones but keeping the ingredients to a minimum can also decrease the sugar and the calories in the dish. A simple dish of berries with a light whipped cream is a delicious dessert, especially for a spring or summer evening. You can also use kitchen staples like cottage cheese to make low calorie creamy desserts that are filling, sweet, and tasty but not as decadent or as unhealthy as other desserts.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo2012120