Title: Nutrition Program on Healthy Meal Planning for Seniors Brings Success in Hardin County

Planning Unit: Hardin County CES

Major Program: General Nutrition

Over the last several months the price of groceries has increased around the world. In some states such as Kentucky within Hardin County they are seeing a shift in the way that people are dealing with this sudden change. This makes it a lot more challenging for some families in particular seniors to afford groceries because the majority of them are on a fixed budget. So as the prices increase this reduces the amount of food that they can purchase. So they need to be more aware of how to make smarter food purchases and look for food items with a better nutritional value and last longer.  In order to meet this need, a Kentucky State University Family and Consumer Science Extension Agent, facilitated a series of classes focusing on educating seniors within the community on how they could improve their diets by learning how to make healthier choices thru learning how to read Nutrition labels and identifying key nutrition’s and looking at how much of a nutritional value the nutrition’s in the food are to their diet. One major goal of the program was to include some activities that shows people specific facts because of the audience including a majority of seniors. In some cases, seniors (and some adults) sometimes tend to have health implications to consider such as diabetes, high blood pressure so they need to make healthier choices but don’t know what to look for in their food selections. So this program assists them in making healthier choices.

This program consisted of a series of 4 sessions of classes and a total of about 40-50 program participants participated in each class session. The class sessions focused on various topics and food demonstrations that allowed the program participants to learn some tips on how to improve upon what they are already doing when they are purchasing foods. The other goal that this program met was that one of the sessions provided the participants with some healthier snack ideas that will provide a higher nutritional value that is based on the amount of vitamins and minerals that is selected to included either more fruits & vegetables or more grains. One of the classes in particular was focused more on teaching program participants how to read nutrition labels. On several other sessions, there were informational sessions on how to prepare healthy snacks that include more  food items on their grocery list that includes more fruits and vegetables which will eventually increase the families consumption of healthier foods and certain vitamins. The fruits that were used in one of the sessions on, “Choosing More Fruits and Vegetables Across the Food Rainbow,” included strawberries, grapes, and pineapples which is higher in the amount of vitamin C and potassium.

Overall, the focus in the session where the program participants looked at nutrition labels was more on looking for specific ingredients on the label such as saturated fats, sugars, and sodium. The reason why there is more of a focus on the nutritional value in the sugars and fats is because consuming foods high in things can lead to poor health implications.  Only if a person consumes higher quantities of certain things such as sodium, sugars, and saturated fats that leads to more poor health implications which makes a higher chance for a decline in the person’s overall health. The problems that will persist in a person consume foods with these nutritional factors includes things like fatigue, headaches, and other changes to their health that can lead to chronic health conditions especially if the person has none. If a person has high blood pressure, that individual needs to be more aware of the amount of sodium they are consuming in every meal. In order to get the program participants to think about this more, we included an activity from a lesson called Nutrition Label Comparisons-Grain Taste Challenge, where we looked at the amount sodium on the food labels and were able to do a tasting challenge to see the difference.  As a result, our program participants were able to see the difference in preparing something with lower sodium in it and saw that there was not much taste difference.

After a qualitative survey at the end of the program, about 96% of the program participants said that they would be using these same techniques of reading the nutrition labels more, and choosing more fruits and vegetables to make healthier choices when they are planning for their meals.

In summary, we will continue having more programs throughout the community to encourage healthy eating habits and other programs providing other health tips to assist individuals with improving their diets.