Nearly one in every six seniors in America is struggling with food insecurity. If you add in those who may have enough to eat but who cannot afford the range of foods that provide them with complete and adequate nutrition, the number is even higher.
AARP, the senior citizen advocacy group, reports that improper nutrition is costing elderly folks about $130 billion in health care bills every year.
Statistics like these point to the importance of meal prep services that can help the elderly. Meal prep services that are combined with regularly scheduled home delivery of meals to seniors can make a life-changing difference for millions of people.
Importance of Meal Planning
Senior citizens face numerous health challenges that younger people never worry about. For example, 16% of women and 4% of elderly men suffer from osteoporosis, the condition of low bone density.
Countering osteoporosis is best handled by providing a calcium-rich diet. Many seniors simply do not have the knowledge, time, strength, or ability to travel so that they can search out and purchase well-balanced foods that also meet high calcium parameters.
Professional meal prep services can easily handle this task for seniors. It takes the guesswork out of meal prep and planning –- and when the meals are delivered directly to homes, all needs are met.
Dietary Restriction and Modifications
Poor calcium diets are just one form of inadequacies in senior diets. For example, it’s common for seniors to develop deficiencies in certain vitamins, minerals, and nutrients as they grow older.
Lack of vitamin D has been identified as a frequent dietary deficiency for seniors. Others lack diets of high fiber. The latter case often results from diets that are short of fresh fruits and vegetables.
These are among the most difficult types of foods for seniors to get consistently. Fruits and vegetables perish more readily and require more frequent trips to grocery stores. That’s problematic for many seniors.
A meal prep service solves this problem as well. Each senior client can work with meal prep and delivery providers to tailor their dietary requirements to the kinds of meals delivered. This is often accomplished in consultation with a professional dietician.
More Than Just Food
The charitable organization Meals on Wheels of America, which began home-delivering meals to seniors in 1954, reports a host of add-on benefits to meal prep and delivery services for the elderly.
As the saying goes, “Man does not live on bread alone.” Meal delivery services have shown themselves to be valuable lifelines for seniors. Regular in-home visits to deliver meals provide excellent opportunities to resolve issues of social isolation, address home safety issues and bolster opportunities to provide holistic care.
Many seniors look forward to seeing a friendly face every day and spending a few minutes chatting with a meal prep and delivery worker. The value of this personal, warm, and friendly human-to-human contact cannot be overstated.
Depression borne out of isolation is greatly relieved by services that deliver meals to seniors daily. Nearly 60% of home meal clients live alone. The majority of them say that the person who delivers their meal is the only person they see on any given day.
Charity and For-Profit
Note that many private businesses supply meal prep and home delivery of meals in addition to government-supported charities, the most well-known of which is Meals on Wheels of America.
Many other such services are locally organized and provided and some are for-profit business models. Both achieve the same important goal of making the lives of seniors a whole lot better.
