Quality of life, food choice and meal patterns - field report of a practitioner.

Quality of life is defined as the result of combining personal resources, control of the environment, personal values, and actual living conditions. Balanced nutrition is an important condition for quality of life, health and well-being. During the course of life everyone develops his very individual biography of eating. This includes eating habits, food choice, and meal patterns. The process of aging is accompanied by hardly recognizable physiological, emotional, social, and environmental changes. Ignoring these changes can lead to malnutrition and nutrition-related problems and thus reduce health, diminish the quality of life, and overall well-being. Accordingly, it is necessary to synchronize the individual biography of eating, the physiological, emotional, social, and environmental changes to enable the aged to feel self-determined and self-confident. This presentation will describe successful examples from local homes for the aged/nursing homes. Examples will show that possibilities of food choice answer the need of the residents to control their environment, that residents can be integrated in the planning and preparation of food and how this corresponds with their need to show their knowledge and experience, that meals in residential facilities can be re-arranged to let the residents experience joy and pleasure, and that nutritional concepts in nursing homes can be changed so that the residents experience themselves as subjects of nutrition. Copyright 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel.