Meals on wheels takes wing to stoke the appetite for life
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday June 13, 2009
THE "anorexia of ageing" where a weaker appetite and less food consumption lead to weight loss is not being met adequately by health and community services, geriatric experts say.Meals on Wheels has begun to encourage housebound people from non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds to eat more by cooking culturally sensitive meals. Its kitchens are preparing kosher and halal food, which adheres to Jewish and Muslim codes, and they are being flown as far as Broken Hill.About 44 per cent of older people who live at home are at risk of under-nutrition, putting them at higher risk of falls, osteoporosis and more frequent and prolonged hospital stays, says Renuka Visvanathan, the director of aged and expanded care services at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide.She told a conference on nutrition and ageing at the University of Sydney this week that several factors contributed to malnutrition in older people, including dementia, dental problems, the prohibitive cost of healthy food, a lack of meal preparation skills, limited mobility and a loss of appetite as a side effect from taking multiple medications."We are all aware of obesity being an issue, but in frail, older people, under-nutrition is a serious issue and we want it to be recognised as being an equally important problem in the community," she said.Australia is home to an increasing number of elderly Muslims, Hindus and people of other Orthodox faiths who live alone. Speaking little English, many are alienated from social services that are not considered culturally appropriate.The manager of Canterbury Meals on Wheels, Christine Pape, said almost all of the 1000 meals prepared in its kitchen each week are halal or sourced from halal producers, who slaughter animals according to a procedure set out in Islamic law.Most meals are delivered by volunteers to housebound people in the Canterbury-Bankstown area, but the kitchen also sends frozen meals to other parts of NSW with burgeoning populations of ageing Muslims."We work with local Arabic-speaking groups who can tell our clients that Meals on Wheels does have halal food and it's OK to eat it," Ms Pape said.The general manager of NSW Meals on Wheels, Sue Heffernan, said the 52-year-old association had had to move away from the standard menu of meat and three vegetables and develop an ad hoc transport system to get other foods to 20,000 people all over the state."If there is someone who needs halal food in Coffs Harbour, we'll get a kitchen in Sydney to freeze it and transport it whatever way we can to the local meals on wheels group, who'll drive it out to the client," she said.It is hard to change the eating habits of a lifetime, so Italians in the Snowy Mountains, Chinese in Fairfield and Ukrainians in Wollongong are given foods they know. "It's like feeding kids broccoli if you serve a bunch of Italians Chinese food, they might not eat it. So you give them what they like to eat," she said.Emeritus Professor Stewart Truswell from the University of Sydney said that as Australia's baby boomers become frail and infirm, many will have to stay at home because institutional care will become overcrowded.He said the problem of under-nutrition must be looked at in the context of poverty, depression and the isolation that comes with long life.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
Share This