Good Nutritional Habits for the Elderly

With age comes a number of new health concerns and an increased need for good nutritional habits. You need to make sure that your body is getting the nutrients that it needs to function properly, but it’s all too easy to get confused by the alphabet of vitamins and minerals out there. To help fill in some of the potential gaps in your knowledge, here are several key nutritional facts for the elderly:

Calcium and Vitamin D Can Save Your Bones

As you get older, your bones will become weaker. This means that you need to consume increased amounts of calcium and vitamin D if you want to keep your bones healthy. If you fail to do so, then you could develop osteoporosis. Even if you don’t get osteoporosis, your bones will still be weak and prone to breaking.

Caloric Intake Decreases With Age

As it turns out, your body needs less and less energy as time goes on. Your basal metabolic rate will decrease and you end up using less calories on average. As such, you will want to decrease calories that you consume on a daily basis. Of course, this doesn’t apply in cases where your level of physical activity increases as you get older, but if your lifestyle isn’t changing with age, then you will probably need to decrease the amount of food that you consume.

Vitamin B12 Becomes Harder to Get

With age comes a decreased capacity to acquire vitamin B12 from food. Unfortunately, B12 is a critical vitamin when it comes to healthy nerves and red blood cells, which means that you will need to find a way to increase your intake if you aren’t getting enough. While B12 occurs naturally in dairy products, meat, and fish, you can also take supplements to make sure that you are hitting your dietary goals.

Hydration Can Be Difficult to Track

If you fail to keep hydrated, then you can suffer from a nasty urinary tract infection or constipation. While keeping hydrated may seem simple and self-explanatory, it actually becomes harder with age. It can become difficult to determine how thirsty you really are, but it is almost always better to err on the side of caution when it comes to hydration. By drinking a few extra cups of water here and there, you can make sure that you never become dehydrated.

Developing Habits and Routines Is Key

Keeping track of your health can be exhausting, but there are ways to make the process a lot simpler and more natural. By adopting healthy habits, like drinking an extra cup of water with every meal or taking a vitamin B12 supplement on a regular basis, you can make the maintenance of your health a reflexive task rather than a chore that you need to manually contemplate and address on a daily basis.