Eating Made Easier: Smart Nutrition Tips for Swallowing Difficulties

Sick people and older adults often find it difficult to eat ordinary food. Often, they find it hard or painful to swallow foods or liquids, and in severe cases, cannot swallow anything. If swallowing difficulties, also called dysphagia, persist, patients require treatment.

Dysphasia often affects seniors or those who are undergoing some treatments, such as chemotherapy. The primary symptoms include frequent heartburn, chest pressure, difficulty swallowing, coughing, choking, and gagging when eating. Luckily, there are diets one can choose whenever they find it difficult to swallow food. This article shares nutritional tips for people with swallowing challenges.

Choose Pureed Diet

The pureed diet is one of the best diets for swallowing difficulties. This is because health professionals recommend eating thicker foods with a consistent texture. So, dysphagia patients can eat pureed foods without lumps or inconsistent textures. Although the food should be soft, pouring or drinking the food from a cup should not be easy. Therefore, caregivers should carefully balance the thickness and consider the patient’s condition to ensure proper nutrition.

Some foods in this category include mashed potatoes with no lumps, porridge, mousse, thick custard, thick, smooth soup, and thick yoghurt. These foods are delicious, easy to chew, soft, and attractive, which helps to encourage dysphagia patients to eat.

Foods that can be pureed easily include avocado, bananas, boiled broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, swede, cooked and blended pasta, fish sauce, and soft meat. However, caregivers should inspect and clean these foods before making a puree.

Try a Soft and Bite-Sized Diet

This diet consists of small pieces of food about the size of a thumbnail that are tender, moist, and soft. The pieces of food should be mashed with a spoon or fork, and no liquid should drip from them. Examples of foods that fit this category include scrambled eggs, diced and boiled vegetables, diced tender meat or fish, and thick sauce with rice.

When managing food texture at home, caregivers should avoid making costly mistakes. Foods that are tough to blend need to be avoided in the initial stages. This includes vegetables and fruits that have skins or are stringy, like strawberries, celery, sweetcorn, peas, apples, and tough meat.

Caregivers should also invest in the appropriate equipment, like a liquidizer or food processor, to aid in sieving and filtering out lumps. This helps ensure a smooth consistency. It is also important to use liquids like milk, water, cheese sauce, margarine, and cream to fortify the meals and make blending easy.

Consider a Minced Diet

A minced diet needs to be moist, soft, and less chewy. The food pieces should not exceed four millimeters. Caregivers should be able to shape and scoop the food onto a plate.

Some foods that naturally have these requirements include minced meat, porridge, mashed vegetables, mashed fish or corned beef hash, thick sauce with rice, and rice pudding. Preparing these meals may take some time, but they are worth it since they are easier for patients to swallow.

These tips can improve the lives of people who find it difficult to swallow food. With these food options and tips, picking and preparing the right diet should not be difficult. However, caregivers should also give dysphagia patients a listening ear to adjust the diet depending on their needs and preferences.