Choosing The Best Diet For Seniors

If you are a care giver, knowing the best diet for seniors is important since it will help you avoid gimmicks and fads. Thus, you need to learn how to choose the best weight loss diet for them.

If you are a senior committed at losing weight, you need not waste time on gimmick diets that have never helped anyone or delivered on their promise. You should also avoid embarking on diet plans that do not fit your personality. Thus, picking on a healthy diet that can help you shed off a few pounds could be a step in the right direction. However, you should be able to live with the diet for a long time. The following are some of the factors you must consider when choosing the diet plan.

Is The Diet Healthy?

This is the most important consideration that you ought to make. Whether the diet is easy to follow or not is not an important factor. What matters is that you need to eliminate any diet that is considered detrimental to your healthy.

Lifestyle

The cost of the food, personal preference, and the lifestyle are important factors that must be considered when making your decision. The diet you choose need not be the favorite diet for your friend.

The pros and the cons

Each diet plan has its own pros and cons. Thus, your habits, dislikes, and likes are key factors that will help you eliminate a particular diet and choose the alternative.

Generally, it is agreed that the best diet for seniors is that which they can easily follow. According to a panel of 35 nutrition experts, 35 diets were featured among the best diets for seniors. Among the things that the experts looked at before recommending the diets are: those that are easy to follow, those that are known to control diabetes and those that were considered healthy for the heart. The Mediterranean diets emerged on the top of the list and were considered the smartest choices for older adults. The diets received more votes since they are ideal for weight loss and can be used to control conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes.

Overweight and obesity are the main issues the seniors struggle with. Thus, any diet that will reduce this problem is considered the best. It is true that as we get older, the amount of calories that we consume must be reduced. In the old age, people do not need to eat as much as they did when they were in 30s and 20s. Older women can do with about 16,000 to 2,200 calories. Young girls require about 2,200 and 3,200 calories. Older men can do with about 2,000 to 2,800 calories compared to the younger men who require between 2,200 and 3,200 of calories.

The frail elderly require foods that are rich in protein. This is because lack of protein puts them at a greater risk because of their low immune system and may suffer from osteoporosis.

However, you really don’t have to follow a specific diet. The seniors require a rounded meal with plenty of protein. They can just eat a bowl of cereal for dinner or toast and tea. They need a lot of protein alright, but they don’t have to eat animal protein in every meal they take. Beans and chickpeas can be great sources of protein.

The seniors must also be fed on low-fat plan such as Ornish diet even though this diet may be harder to be followed and may not be ideal for them.

According to Michael Davidson, a director at the University of Chicago Medical Center, the oldies may have a problem when it comes to thinking about what type of a balanced food to include in their menu. He has seen a lot of frail seniors suffering from iron deficiency problems and concluded that these seniors do not eat enough red meat. He therefore recommends the paleo diet for the seniors even though the diet is ranked lowly among the best diets for the seniors.

This diet has more hype and is said to have more complex carbohydrates. He has also noted constipation as the main problem for the seniors and he attributes it to low carb and low fiber diets. Thus, he concludes that the best diet for seniors must be rich in fiber and proteins.

More tips about a healthy diet for seniors can be found in the video below.

Thanks for reading and we hope that it helps!