When visiting your parents, make sure to keep an eye out for these five signs of malnutrition.
Have you visited your parents recently? Are you wondering if you should worry about them and their eating habits?
As their children, this is a good thing. And there are some signs that you can look for concerning their nutrition and eating habits that may indicate your parent needs some help. Dianna Malkowski, a Mayo trained nutritionist, gave the following five signs in a recent blog post.
- Is their clothing loose or are they showing other signs of weight loss
- In their mouths are they experiencing health issues? Do you see things like swollen or bleeding gums or tooth decay
- Are there signs of anemia such as excessive bruising?
- Do they have wounds that are taking longer than normal to heal?
- Are they experiencing muscle weakness? What about fatigue? Or dizziness?
If you are seeing any of these, it may be time to look into different options of elderly care help.
Consider what eating was like in your family growing up? Or when you had mealtimes with your own children. Meals were generally a social event, time to be together and visit.
Do your eating habits change when you are alone? The answer to that is often yes.
Now multiply that cycle of eating alone over days, weeks, months, and years. That is going to have an impact of your health.
What are ways that you make eating more social for your loved one? Leave your comment below.
A couple of ways to make meals more social is to make sure your parent is eating at a senior center or by using a caregiver. If you utilize a caregiver from Valley Help at Home, not only will they have the chance to eat with someone else, but they will have the entire social dining experience, from the meal being prepared for them with the caregiver there to the clean up afterward.
Want to increase the social aspect of your parent’s eating experience? Contact us today! Call us at 208-557-4215, or click to visit our Contact Us page and we will reach out to you.
For more on Dianna Malkowski’s blog post, you can read it here.
