THE woman behind a Brisbane company that manufactures nutrition-based food products for seniors and people with swallowing disorders has blasted nursing homes that serve up second-rate food.
"The fight to combat malnutrition and dehydration starts and ends with food," Flavour Creations founder Bernadette Eriksen told The Senior.
"The meal time experience is vital for socialising but often people are embarrassed that they cannot swallow or feel humiliated having to eat pureed food.
"Families must take a stand and insist that their loved ones are served food that meets their dietary and health needs and actually looks and tastes good.
"And kitchens have the responsibility of ensuring that every mouthful counts.
"The best way to make food more enticing is to improve its presentation."
Ms Eriksen, Telstra's 2017 Queensland Business-woman of the Year, has invested two decades and millions of dollars developing a range of food and drink thickeners to help people with swallowing issues eat well.
Flavour Creations' products, increasingly used in residential and aged care facilities and hospitals in Australia and New Zealand, enable food to be pureed and moulded to resemble the "real" food for presentation purposes with boosted nutritional value.
"There is no excuse for serving up food that doesn't provide the correct nutritional requirements," Ms Eriksen said. "What's worse, some facilities serve food that can't be eaten at all or can even cause choking because the residents have a swallowing disorder."
Monash University researcher Joe Ibrahim recently revealed a 400 per cent increase in preventable deaths over the past decade in Australian nursing homes. Choking was the cause of death in 8 per cent of cases - an under-estimate in Ms Eriksen's opinion.
"This is not just an issue of food quality," she said. "There's an immense social cost for those unable to swallow."
Hard to swallow facts
- More than a million Australians are affected by dysphagia or difficulty swallowing.
- It's not necessarily age-related. However a swallowing disorder may affect:
84 per cent of people with Parkinson's disease, half of those in nursing homes, 40 per cent of stroke survivors, and all those with Alzheimer's at some point in their disease progression.
