Abstract
Adding flavours can encourage food intake in older adults for health benefits. The use and attitudes of 22 community-dwelling UK older adults (15 females, aged 65–83 years) towards foods and products that add flavour, e.g., sauces and seasonings, were investigated. Participants used foods/products to add flavour when cooking and eating from 0 to 17 times/day. Taste and flavour were important, and foods/products could add flavour, make foods more pleasant and did not cause discomfort. There were concerns, however, over the healthiness of some foods/products, while consuming a healthy diet and one’s health were important. Reasons for adding flavours largely centred around ‘meal enhancement’, reasons for not adding flavours focused on ‘the product itself’ and ‘characteristics of the meal’, but there was ‘variation’ and many ‘individual differences’. Our findings highlight the benefits of adding flavours for food intakes, particularly the use of naturally flavoursome foods, such as herbs, spices, onion and garlic.
Highlights
Many older adults do not consume sufficient foods to meet their needs, resulting in undernutrition or high malnutrition risk [1,2,3]
Preferences for taste and flavour have previously been found repeatedly in older adults, as has the use of flavours to enhance the pleasure gained from foods and eating [24,38,43,50,56]
To take this work forward, our findings suggest a need for increased awareness of the benefits of adding flavours to foods to increase food intakes that may be of health benefit to older adults, but we demonstrate a need for sensitivity to existing perceptions towards adding flavours and flavoursome foods
Summary
Many older adults do not consume sufficient foods to meet their needs, resulting in undernutrition or high malnutrition risk [1,2,3]. Many reasons have been provided for low food consumption in older adults, including poor appetite; sensory deterioration; poor gastric mobility and function; poor physical abilities such as reduced dentition, poor manual dexterity and physical disability; and social concerns such as bereavement, loneliness, and reduced finances [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. Key reasons that are repeatedly provided by older adults themselves relate to taste and enjoyment: that foods are unpleasant, bland or have uninteresting flavours. Qualitative studies report liking, taste and flavour as highly important for older adults [16,17,19,25], and questionnaire studies report liking and taste as key predictors of food intake [15,22,26,28,29]
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