They are feeding crap..!

do you know what we need. MORE CATERING MANAGERS DOING PAPER WORK.

I’m horrified!

Beggars belief Ben…hope it went well!

Thanks Joan, the operation went very well and I made a full recovery. The medical and nursing staff were brilliant. My only complaint really was the food.

Ha, trust me Vincent’s food is as good as it gets

That’s grim so!

The food in both Beaumont and the Mater is woeful. And you’re lucky if you get what you ordered from the menu form. But ye cant beat a bit of coddle in James’s Hospital, its made on site and its really nice.

Coddle thank god they’ve never fed me in James’

Oh no, not Jamie. That’d be awful.

Get Corrigan.

Lucky you Resel, i was in hospital for a month last november and the food was terrible, especially the toast, it was browned, and left under tin foil for an hour while it went round all the wards, by the time it came, it was cold, wet from the condensation and rubbery, So no, even the toast is tragic!

Ha! If you thought that was bad you’d wanna try be a breastfeeding coeliac….sorry love but the they didn’t tell us in the kitchen…..rice crackers after childbirth? My sugar levels are dropping just thinking of it!

@ Eimear god love you, that is horrible, i am vegetarian out of choice, the taste of meat has never agreed with me even as a child, I just could never get used to it, as a teenager I became a veggie, all my children are meat eaters and i have no problems cooking it, I just don’t eat it. I was thinking if it was bad for me, it must be terrible if anyone with dietary needs, I think it is madness that the people they have serving food don’t understand what a coeliac dietary needs are, fair dues to you being a b/f mum with coeliac you must have been exhausted.

@ Norse Thor Ah I survived on the love buzz alone! Regardless of whether your diet is by choice or necessity there should be provision for all types of diets. This is not the fifties!! How hard would it be to have a few slices of gluten free bread or a couple of boxes of Qourn burgers in the freezer?! But that would take box thinking outside!

I agree with you that there is a hell of a lot of work to be done, and by no means could the staff bringing the meals to the patients be held responsible for the quality of the food (unless they don’t put it anywhere near the patient of course, that’s shocking!)..

The people in charge of buying in the ingredients etc should have someone qualified in nutrition running the show. Someone who’s thinking about presenting a good nutritious meal wont be buying salty sugary bread, or chips. They’ll be buying vegetables and making decent food. All hospitals should have a kitchen on site – ordering in food from outside makes no sense whatsoever, that implies it has to be reheated and that’s gonna destroy whatever goodness was left in it after cooking..

Although, it would be interesting to see what would happen if you got a raw hospital.. As in, they served the living food diet, vegetable and fruit smoothies for those having trouble chewing.. Far more nutritious than a fortisip and cheaper too, no need for stoves etc, just preparation space..

I agree about the purchasing Shanti and it would be nice to see patients presented with a choice of appealing healthy meals. While all meals are cooked on site in the hospital where I work I understand this is not the case in all hospitals but it is a requirement that all hot meals have to be reheated to a high temperature for a certain time, this is always checked with random audits and is to ensure everyone can be confident of all the food. It’s a necessary evil.
While you and I may like the idea of smoothies, and there are patients who have difficulty chewing or swallowing, smoothies may not be for them. A balanced diet is always the best idea but for some patients drinks like Fortisip are necessary and can provide them with what they need at that time.

I’m afraid I’d have to disagree. Those fortisip things are overpriced sugar, like the Danone actimels..

They use the least bioavailable forms of each vitamin / mineral, and in very tiny amounts – the same amount you could easily get from a juiced selection of fresh vegetables. When I said smoothie I wasn’t talking the stuff you buy in bars – I meant vegetable and fruit combinations – they can be tailored so well and have other things like grains, wheatgrass, nuts, seeds, beans etc ground up and added..
It would not be as sugary as the fortisip (which isn’t really a bad thing), although you could add Manuka honey or more fruit for the same effect – this would add enzyme content and the Manuka honey has its own benefits.. You could add coconut oil for MCTs, flax and walnut oil for EFAs..
Vitamin D3 would need to be supplemented while stuck indoors however. When well enough patients should be encouraged to get a few minutes (whatever amount their skin requires) UVB exposure per day (without sunscreen).

I only suggest it because when done correctly the living food diet is one of the most healthy diets out there. However, correctly involves having someone who knows what they are at sorting out the menus, I realise it isn’t really feasible though!

Shanti I’m not a dietician but I know many elderly patients who have difficulty swallowing cannot tolerate things like grains, nuts, seeds, beans. While I can see your point, these patients have a delicate disposition and a smoothie like you suggest would, err, well… go straight through them. A Fortisip drink and an Actimel are two very different things and shouldn’t be compared, Actimel has absolutely no health benefits, despite their claims while Fortisip has. It has a carefully balanced amount of minerals, vitamins, electrolytes and calories needed to help a patient recuperate and there are different types for for different needs. You can’t buy it in the local dairy isle so it isn’t a consumer product.
I’ll take your word about the living food diet but the vast majority of the patients who we’re talking about are elderly, very ill and/or very weak, they just wouldn’t be able to tolerate such a diet. If they ever were to tolerate it they would first need to be built back up to their former self and that requires Fortisip, or products like it.

Brian, if you would care to look back there, I had said that nuts / seeds / beans / grains would be ground up.
You can make flour, milk and butters from most of them, so you would actually use them to bulk up a vegetable / fruit juice to the same consistency as these replacements.
Think baby food. It’s very simple to make these foods easy to swallow without chewing and not have them too thin for someone who has trouble swallowing.. One of my residents who has MND uses this approach, and she can’t swallow thin fluids without choking.

Because nuts and seeds have a high fat content they would naturally have a much higher calorie content (fats provide 4 times the calories of carbohydrate – which is the primary constituent of these yoghurt type foods, fats are also a source of vitamins and essential fatty acids, not to mention they are a nutritional requirement and MCTs as found in coconut oil are the brains preferred source of energy).
Add to that they would be a better source of fibre than fortisips – while still maintaining the same consitency, purely as a result of their cellulose content. This would improve intestinal health – by nourishing the probiotic bacteria in the gut, thereby increasing immunity.

But the main issue I have with them is their “nutritional” ingredients..
Did you know that for each nutrient deemed essential to the diet there are at *least* 20 different synthetic patented forms in addition to the form found in nature?
You cannot patent natural molecules so it follows through that of all those different forms, only one of them is the actual molecule or compound that your body requires. The other forms are not in fact vitamins or dietary minerals, they are synthetic vitamin isolates and for the most part, salt bound minerals. And they’re the ones used in these things (and most commercial vitamin supplements).

The reason they are termed “isolates” is because they are the part of the vitamin determined to be the active part by the company securing the patent. The problem is that your body needs the whole thing.
For example, if you eat rose hips you will get ascorbates and citrus bioflavinoids, which are required to build collagen. Ascorbic acid is the vitamin isolate, when you take it, it requires bioflavinoids like rutin and hespedrin in order to be used. This will either come from the food you eat or whatever is in the body already. If there’s no bioflavinoids, then the ascorbic acid is excreted – this is where the “expensive urine” idea came from. Isolates are not complete, they can’t do the job effectively.

Then there’s the actual level of nutrients in the things, considering you want to increase the persons intake, giving them what they would get from half a carrot or 1/3 of a brazil nut is very little. A raw food version would provide substantially more nutritive value, and it would be real food with real nutrients.

Surely when someone is having difficulty eating and is also in poor health, what they need is good nutrient dense FOOD in the easiest form to digest, as opposed to chemicals that are similar to nutrients in sugary set yoghurts?

Shanti I’m sory I didn’t notice you said the nuts, seeds etc could be ground up. These products are provided to patients who cannot get their bodys daily nutritional needs by eating ordinary food, usually as a result of illness, my own son had to supplement his diet with some of these products as a child. At the end of the day these products work. I see them do so.
I was thinking about a young patient, a lad in his 20′s who was quite ill and had to take these pproducts. I remember talking to him at the time and asking him if he wouldn’t prefer anything else, I’d arrange it. He simply couldn’t eat anything. Weeks later he gradually could and began to eat. This was a young, previously fit man restorred to health. Could smoothies have done the same thing? Maybe but in his condition would they be palatable? They would also have to be prepared freshly every day at least and at at time when the price of hospital food is coming under the spotlight I bet a 100ml of Fortisip, which we know works, is still cheaper than 100 ml of a smoothie which will require someone to make it, deliver the ingredients daily and adjust them for each patient whereas Fortisip has wide range.
I think products like fortisip do the job of restoring an ill person back to health very well, the smoothies you’re describing keep them there.

Jackie, bet all the bread was that white shite, just colonclogger, as for bacon sandwich, say its months or more since I had that (though I do indulge), what a bad diet for hospital food. Just cos it’s edible don’t mean it’s good for you!

White bread = refined carbohydrate = sugar
Bacon, pumped full of nitrates which are carcinogenic
Custard = sugar and dairy – the second most common food allergy / intolerance in the world, promotes mucous build up too..
Those yoghurt things? Likely the fortisips I mentioned above, sodium bound minerals which your body cannot use (and some are slightly toxic eg sodium selenite), synthetic vitamin isolates which interfere with your bodies ability to use real vitamins (eg DL-alpha-tocopherol) and of course, more sugar..

Yes.. It may have tasted alright, stuff that’s nearly all sugar or fat will. But the nutrient value is on par with a happy meal, it’s good that you got the option of vegetables – but I’m guessing they either boiled or steamed the bejaysus out of them thus drastically reducing their nutrient value (most vitamins are destroyed by heat and minerals leach out into cooking water).

It’s a long shot from being good nutritious food, and seeing as vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids etc are by definition essential to your health, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a hospital would be mindful of that!!