| Does a Caregiver Have to be a Nutrition Nazi? |
Apart from the absolutely wonderful bread and rolls she made, my mother was a pretty dreadful cook. She didn’t have much interest in or curiosity about food, and her tastes were simple. By the time she came to live with us, her doctors had prescribed a “heart healthy” diet for her. On the face of it, this diet included a lot of things she didn’t like and eliminated just about everything she did like.
Left to her own devices, she would have pretty much lived on oatmeal, eggs, Maine red hot dogs, potato chips and ice cream. She loved salt, sugar and fat.
We did our best to provide the low sodium, low fat, low sugar diet her doctors wanted her to follow, but it clearly went against her grain. She rarely complained about the meals we prepared, but there were a lot of things she just wouldn’t eat.
At some point, we quit trying so hard. She was, after all, 85 years old. She wasn’t diabetic and her blood pressure was OK. As one of her doctors pointed out, she must have been doing something right with the foods she was eating. We decided that our extreme vigilance about her diet was wasting energy we needed for other areas of care–although we still insisted that she eat the occasional salad.
I don’t believe we could have relaxed about her diet, however, if her medical needs had been different. My father was hypertensive and diabetic. Strict dietary control would have done him some good, but he always cheated on his diabetic diet. It took years off his life. He could have used a Nutrition Nazi.
As for Mom, at some point every summer she would gesture toward her salad, purse her lips and then announce that she had decided to eat her “annual radish.”
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Tags: aging parents, caregiver, nutrition