Nutrition Education for Local Elders
Abstract
- Working at Mountain Health Center, it quickly became apparent that good nutrition is a challenge. Many patients, because of medical conditions like type II diabetes or heart disease, need to alter their diets to improve their health. On a home visit, I got a chance to see some of the particular challenges elderly patients face. One of the patients I visited had difficulty eating because of decreased appetite. In this case, good medical care included not only treatment for his health conditions, but also making sure that he got sufficient calories in his diet.
- For my community health project, I was interested in reaching out to a local community organization to give a talk so that I could get a chance to see another side of community health. Dr. Bouchard helped connect me with the Elderly Services Center in Middlebury. It turned out that they were particularly interested in having an informative talk on nutrition, so I decided to make that my topic. Ultimately, I decided to give a talk to Project Independence a day program at the Elderly Services Center.
- I decided that my talk would focus on the basics of good nutrition, but would touch briefly on topics of particular concern to elderly individuals (such as important nutrients, getting sufficient water, and a brief discussion of carbohydrates, since some of the people I spoke to were diabetic).