Does Your Senior’s Diet Include Seafood?
When you and your senior start planning to improve her diet, one item you might want to include is seafood, especially if your senior doesn’t have any allergies to fish or shellfish. In-home care professionals are a tremendous help any time your senior starts to think about changing her eating habits because they can remove a lot of the uncertainty about meal preparation. Here are some of the great reasons to encourage your senior to eat more seafood.
Seafood Is Full of Nutrients
Your elderly family member might think about seafood being high in protein, and it is. It’s also a fantastic source of omega-3 fatty acids and tons of other nutrients, like vitamins A and D as well as B complex vitamins. Other nutrients, like selenium, magnesium, and potassium, are also present in seafood in high amounts. When you want to add more nutrient-dense foods into your senior’s diet, seafood is a great option.
It’s Excellent for Brain, Heart, and Eye Health
Brain health is a big concern for aging adults, so eating foods that help to support cognitive functioning is a natural part of helping that happen. The fats in seafood help with brain health, but also help to protect vision. Heart health is another big reason to embrace adding foods with more omega-3 fatty acids to your senior’s diet. The nutrients in seafood help with reducing bad cholesterol, which can be essential when your elderly family member is battling high cholesterol levels. Many people who deal with high blood pressure also find that eating more seafood can help to control those levels as well.
Seafood Might Help Your Senior Get Better Sleep
Some of the nutrients in seafood, especially B vitamins and magnesium, can help your elderly family member to get better quality sleep. That’s especially important if she’s been having trouble sleeping or staying asleep. These nutrients serve as building blocks for building other chemicals and hormones that are necessary for sleep, like melatonin.
Eating More Seafood Can Help with Moods
Getting more seafood in your senior’s diet won’t necessarily solve all of her mental health issues, but the building blocks seafood gives her body can help her to have what she needs to synthesize neurotransmitters that help with mood regulation. Because seafood also helps the brain to be healthier, your senior might get additional mental health benefits from increasing the seafood in her diet.
Preparing Seafood Might Feel More Difficult than it Has to Be
One problem your elderly family member might have is that she may want to eat seafood more often but find that it’s too difficult to prepare on her own. This is a situation in which in-home care providers can be a huge help. Home care professionals can take a lot of the work out of keeping your senior well-nourished, offering her a diet rich in a lot of different types of nutrients, including those from seafood.
Any time you and your senior are considering making big changes to her diet, it’s a good idea to talk with her doctor about it first. There might be other variables that can affect what she needs to be eating, so it’s important to know for sure what her body needs the most.
Source
https://doh.wa.gov/community-and-environment/food/fish/health-benefits
If you are considering in-home care in Henderson, NV, for an aging loved one, please contact the caring staff at Golden Heart Senior Care of Summerlin. 702-800-4616.