Building diet resources after my father's early-onset diagnosis - seeking your experiences

robp

Hello everyone,

My father was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's earlier this year, and through our journey, we've found it challenging to find good dietary resources and support. I'm working on building an online resource to help others facing similar challenges.

Before building it, I'd really value hearing about your experiences:

1. What's been the most challenging part of making dietary changes? (Like finding recipes, grocery shopping, meal planning, etc.)

2. For those following specialized diets (like ketogenic/Mediterranean/etc.), what are your biggest daily struggles in trying to stick with it? Which diet are you trying to adhere to?

I want to ensure whatever I build actually addresses the real problems we all face in this journey. Your experiences would be incredibly helpful in shaping this resource to be truly useful for our community.

Thank you for any insights you're willing to share

Carl46

The hardest part for me was having to make meals from two menus because others in the household refused to eat what I was supposed to eat.

I eat what my doctor told me to eat. At each meal, divide the plate into quarters. One quarter protein, one carb, two veggies. No fried food, no red meat. So, pretty close to Mediterranean diet. As a result, I am no longer diabetic and no longer a customer for King Size, a mail order clothing company.

If you really want to eat healthy, buy a diabetic cookbook and use it. What diabetics are supposed to eat is actually what everybody is supposed to eat.

One of my friends went on the keto diet, in those days called the high protein diet. He lifted weights as well. He looked great, right up to the day of his heart attack at age 45. The keto, paleo, and similar diets are high fat diets, and not good for humans.

harshedbuzz

@robp

Hi and welcome. I am sorry for your reason to be here but glad you found this place.

IME, most mainstream physicians recommend a heart-healthy diet like DASH or the Mediterranean Diet for everyone. It is included in the Best Practices for PWD.

1. The biggest part of making dietary changes is getting buy-in from others. This lack of enthusiasm, IME, may be rooted in a baked-in preference for the food they grew up on (my DH, lean to a fault who loves junk), ignorance around nutrition (my son who lives on Chipotle insisting brown rice isn't a carb) and my dad (with dementia with a palate that craves sweet).

2. In dementia, the changing palate can be an issue early on. One of my first clues was dad's consumption of ice cream and cookies; growing up this was not anything he ate. Before dementia my parents both ate along the Mediterranean Diet lines— broiled fish, chicken, a huge salad, veggies and maybe a jacket potato. As a kid, he took us out to an ice cream parlor every Friday night after doing payroll at his shop where we had sundaes and he had a cup of coffee and sometimes a BLT.

As his dementia progressed, he preferred foods that were easy— soups, chicken fingers, foods that were sauced or in gravy and easy to swallow. Further into the disease progression, it's typical for appetite to tank and it becomes a challenge to get any kind of calories in. Hydration can be an issue at this point as well.

HB