Home Care: Eating healthy during the holidays is important.
As tempting it is to ignore a doctor’s advice, your parents need to stick to their dietary restrictions. Support them by making sure the foods that are served meet their guidelines. Your dad’s high blood pressure has him on a low-sodium diet. Your mom has diabetes and cannot have sugary and processed foods. With a few adjustments, these dietary concerns are easy to handle by you or your home care provider.
Home Care: Healthy Eating
Ways to Lower Salt Intake
Salt adds flavor, but there are other ways to add flavor without salt. Fresh herbs add a lot of extra flavors. Instead of loading a soup with salt, flavor the broth with potent herbs like basil, oregano, rosemary, and thyme.
Fresh citrus is also a good way to add flavor. For a pot of chicken noodle soup, use fresh dill, slices of lemon, black pepper, and garlic. Fresh vegetables and whole wheat noodles finish it off.
Learn to Read Labels
Pay close attention to the labels on foods you purchase for your parents. The whole grain bread you’re buying could have a lot of added sugar listed as corn syrup, honey, maple syrup, or malt syrup.
Look at the sodium content to see how high it is. Canned soups often have excessive amounts of sodium. You might also find high quantities of sodium in salsa, condiments, and other sauces.
Cook From Scratch
Making foods from scratch is the best way to control quality and ingredients. Help your parents make bone broth in batches that you can freeze until needed.
The carcass from a turkey after a holiday meal is all you need. Fill a pot with water, and add the turkey bones and some fresh herbs. Simmer that for hours and strain it. Use beef, pork, fish, or chicken bones to make other types of bone broth.
Make bread at home. You can make a slow-rising bread that doesn’t have added sugar or fat with some whole-wheat flour, yeast, and water.
Home Care: Make Sure Your Parents Have Help Shopping
When you’re not with your parents, do they have anyone helping them shop for healthy foods? With personal care at home, aides can join them on shopping trips, read the fine print to check for ingredients they need to avoid and help them carry in the groceries at home.
Call a home care agency to learn more about meal preparation and shopping assistance. Your parents don’t have to struggle with healthy eating when you’re not around.
If you or an aging loved-one are considering hiring Home Care in Bala Cynwyd, PA, please talk to the caring staff at Better Care Home Health Services LLC today. Serving individuals and their families in Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery, and Bucks counties. Call Today: (267) 766-5218
Better Care Home Health Services is a family-owned agency dedicated to providing excellent and comprehensive home health care to individuals and families of Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery and Bucks counties. We are honored that God has blessed us with the opportunity to positively impact and change people’s lives. It is our mission to ensure that we provide the very best of care to our clients.
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