A healthy plan for senior citizens

Proper diet and a healthy life go hand in hand, especially for older adults over the age of 65. According to reports by World Health Organization (WHO), a majority of the diseases that older people suffer are as a result of lack of proper diet.

For instance, fat in food is linked cancer of the prostate, colon, and pancreas. Degenerative diseases such as osteoporosis and diabetes are also diet-related, more specifically with micronutrients.

Micronutrients deficiency is shared among the elderly due to factors such as reduced food intake and lack of variety in their diet.

Decreased Sensitivity

As you advance in age, your senses become numbed down; it takes more energy and time to trigger a stimulus. Your sense of smell and taste decreases reducing your appetite. In some cases, you may even have trouble differentiating fresh food from stale since your senses are compromised. This, without any doubt, would be detrimental to your health.

Medication Side Effects

Some medications cause nausea, reduced appetite, and change food tastes perceptions. In this case, the side effects can discourage you from eating, and you end up skipping meals.

Poor Dental Health

Dental issues are more likely to come up as you grow older such as missing teeth, receding gums that cause your teeth to be shaky, mouth sores, and jaw pain. All these factors make chewing painful and uncomfortable hence reducing the likelihood of taking healthy foods among seniors.

Lack of Finances

Older people have limited resources and worry more about money. They may, therefore, cut back on groceries and buy cheaper food, which, in most cases, is less nutritious. This lifestyle can result in many nutritional deficiencies.

Lack of Transportation

To shop for fresh cooking ingredients, you have to drive to the store, wait through heavy traffic, and park the car a distance from the door. If it’s raining or snowing, it’s even more challenging. Chances of slipping and falling are high. These activities may discourage you from going to shop altogether.

Physical Difficulty

Seniors become weaker with age, especially when dealing with conditions like arthritis and disability. Pain and poor physical strength can make simple tasks appear to be challenging. Performing basic functions like standing for long while cooking, carrying groceries, or even peeling a fruit may become daunting tasks.

Memory Loss

Memory loss, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease are fairly typical among seniors. A senior may forget to follow their recommended meal program or skip a meal or even forget to buy food from the store. This poses a nutritional challenge.

Depression

As you grow older, a lot of changes take place, (your children move away, you lose your friends and loved ones due to death, you feel lonely—especially if you live all by yourself, you experience physical changes). All these issues compounded can lead to depression. Seniors may become apathetic about their health and avoid eating. If left untreated, depression can lead to much more significant health problems.

Source: https://aging.com/elderly-nutrition-101-10-foods-to-keep-you-healthy/

Porosh’s Kitchen – The journey begins

For quite some time we have been thinking of what else Porosh can do to serve its members better without stretching itself too thin across different verticals. It is then that we thought of launching ‘Porosh’s Kitchen’ so that during hours of need, or crises our members can be served better.

No doubt offering a service of this nature comes with a lot responsibility. One needs to be ever vigilant regarding the quality of food being served and also on-time delivery.

Thus, having set the house in order almost immediately Porosh started receiving enquiries from its members about ‘Porosh’s Kitchen’. Little did we realize that the 3rd Covid wave shall lead to a deluge of requests for home delivery of food (lunch and dinner) from our members who have been infected with Covid and thus, facing difficulties to have proper meal due home quarantine restrictions.

Keeping in mind the medical history of our members we started to deliver home cooked food comprising set Bengali thali (both veg and non-veg) as per requirements of our members. We kept prices as nominal as possible. We also requested them to send request for home delivery atleast 24 hours in advance because ours is not a QSR.

Our excitement of rolling-out the new service got further fillip when we started receiving generous feedback from our members unasked for. Thus, we hope to continue serving the senior citizens (i.e. our members) better every passing day by constantly challenging ourselves and thinking out-of-box.

Porosh’s new website

Porosh’s regular readers may recall that in a couple of blogs in the past we had highlighted about our responsiveness to member/ client expectations from us and our response to those.

Let us share the latest example. Some time around mid-November we received a call from a client of ours based-out-of Germany. He shared an insight about which we were blissfully unaware. He conveyed that unlike websites of a few other organizations offering similar services, Porosh offers limited information. As a result, many interested persons do not get necessary information in details.

We realized that Porosh needs to re-think about the layout and contents of the website so that all necessary information are conveyed and the visitor also gets an experience worth-remembering. All said and done, it was agreed upon that the new website had to be launched within 30 days of receiving the feedback.

Thus, having set the goal we held several rounds of brain-storming sessions. Ideas were tossed, debated upon and then we zeroed on the final design. After that responsibilities were bestowed upon two the team members for developing contents for and designing of the website.

The final look of the website exactly resembled what we were looking forward to. It was launched well inside 30 days! Did some one say, what cannot be measured cannot be managed? For those, who have visited our website in the past should be able to see the difference. It will be wonderful you if you could share your feedback on what else we should do to make the site more user-friendly by mailing at info@poroshkolkata.org.