When you are a Senior

Written by Dr Harold Gunatillake

When you are a senior your associates, social friends and near families, may get distanced from you for inevitable causes, and some would have passed away leaving happy memories; your close kith and kin may not have much time for you because they have their own life.

You may tend to neglect your nutritious food you once enjoyed with your family, and your care-taker may not be concerned for you much as far as giving you care and a balanced diet daily, through lack of knowledge or experience.

When you were young you could live on KFC’s chicken and MacDonnell’s hamburgers. But with age for your health and longevity it is important to have a balanced nutritious diet.

Getting a balanced diet could be a challenge for anyone, leaving aside being old.

Food becomes your medicine. It was Hippocrates who said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”. How true that quotes when it applies to the aged.
Nutritious food is your gasoline or energy for your body’s metabolic activities, and high octane fuel may be required with age. Your food supplies you with nutrients to fuel all biochemical reactions that keep you fit and healthy. If you do not get sufficient nutritious food you may become malnourished and you and your close ones may assume that it is justly old-age’ as most people would believe.

When old and lonely, tasty nutritious food becomes a basic pleasure, as much as company.

Vitamins: You need more vitamins when you are old, because absorption becomes sluggish due to less enzyme presence for digestion. Your care-taker need to keep a close eye on your B6, B12, folic acid, calcium and vitamin D, among many others.

If you are not a vegetarian your vitamins and micronutrients are well supplied by organ meats like liver, fish and eggs. Vegans may have to depend on whole grains and dark greens, beans, crucifers and so on. They are disadvantaged with age, and become a problem for the care-takers, too.

A glass of milk will supply the calcium and vitamin D. Consuming yogurt daily is to your advantage. Supplements are a must as you age such as vitamin A & D, B12, Vit. C, fish oils among others. If you have lactose intolerance almond and soy milk are good substitutes.

Fiber: Your bowels become sluggish with age, and you need to take lot of food containing high fiber content. Such fibrous components give bulk and viscosity to the digested food and help the intestinal muscles to move them towards the large gut. Most vegies have high fiber and resistant starchy foods like rice, unripe bananas, and pre-biotics keep the micro biota in the large bowels happy and they do most of the digestion and fermentation of fiber for you, supplying short chain fatty acids for the health of the gut lining, preventing inflammation and cancer.

A tablespoon of selenium powder may be required if high fiber vegies are insufficient to move the bowels. Meat products have no fiber at all.

Potassium seems to be an important micro-nutrient with age. Heart muscles work best when there is adequate amount in the blood stream. Potassium also keeps your blood pressure normal and deficiency can cause high blood pressure.

Eating a fruit or a variety will provide sufficient daily requirement of potassium. Vegies like potatoes, tomatoes, bananas, spinach supply sufficient potassium naturally. Potassium tablets may be required daily if you are on diuretics.

Fats: Avoid using much dietary saturated fats and concentrate more on the unsaturated fats like olive oil, canola, and vegies containing alpha linoleic acid, which is converted to omega-3 type of fatty acids.

Restrict using butter, margarine, instead use olive oil. In the Continent Olive oil sandwiches are a treat and why not follow?

Restrict red meat and go for fish and poultry as the Mediterranean’s do.

Prebiotics and Probiotics: Poor gut health could be one of the main reasons that you suffer in your old-age. You need more good micro biota totally over ten trillions in your gut for good health. If the bad bacteria outnumber, you become ill, depressed and succumb prematurely to death.
You need to take probiotics like yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut and fermented foods daily to help the good bacteria in the gut to function efficiently to look after your health and boost your immune system.

You could create a healthy prebiotic environment is with high fiber diet. This has been already mentioned earlier- the importance of high fiber diet in old age. High fiber prevents constipation and removes toxins from your gut.

Foods that age: There are certain foods that age you fast and they should be minimized at all times. Foods high in added sugar, foods containing trans-fat to increase shelf life, excessive alcohol and indulging in foods containing unhealthy saturated fats, should be minimized. Go for foods containing healthy fats as in all nuts, avocados, salmon, flaxseed, almonds and so on.

Minimizing added salt to your food will help you to normalize your blood pressure.

A glass of red wine daily is recommended to seniors. Flavones, including resveratrol seem to have antioxidant properties and go for it.

Going for a walk daily with a pedometer attached to the waist-line recording the step numbers is useful and encourages you to record the number of steps you have achieved for the day. If possible walk for one hour, or do 10,000 steps.

Forget your cholesterol numbers in your blood. As you age cholesterol also increases in your blood and acts as an antioxidant. It is unnecessary to take statins and lower your cholesterol level in your blood.

Statistic reveal that when statins are given to old people in a nursing home to stabilize the cholesterol numbers and a control group not given the statin, it was found that the latter group lived much longer than those who had statin therapy.

Eat at least two eggs a day. Remember that eggs have the potency to give life, and that’s all done from the nutrients with in. Eggs taken daily may substitute taking most supplements. It has most essential micronutrients and super-proteins, except vitamin C.

Sense of thirst: Sense of thirst gets weaker as you get older. You need to keep a bottle of water beside you all the time as a reminder to drink sufficient volume of water. You need to drink at least 3 liters of water to hydrate yourself, for your health of your skin and flush toxins out of your kidneys.
Hope this article benefits those people nearing the departure lounge.