Fueling your body properly is vital to staying healthy. A diet rich in certain vitamins and minerals can give you energy while improving overall wellbeing.
Family physicians should utilize screening tools to detect malnutrition and collaborate with registered dietitian nutritionists to assess nutritional status. This may involve reviewing anthropometric measurements; lab values; food and nutrition history as well as reviewing food-and-drink records.
Artificial Feeding
Feeding with commercial nutrient mixtures injected through a tube directly into the stomach or small intestine (and sometimes directly into blood vessels) when someone cannot eat or swallow. Used when no other option exists.
Tubes used include the nasogastric (NG) tube, which goes through the nose and into the stomach; and gastrostomy/percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tubes, which are usually longer-term solutions used with patients who no longer swallow.
People requiring artificial feeding should be referred to a multidisciplinary nutrition support team (NST). While their composition and experience vary, each NST must include at least one specialist nurse and dietitian.
Enteral Nutrition
Enteral Nutrition (EN) provides essential nutrients necessary for good health and weight maintenance to those unable to eat safely or adequately, in the form of liquid nutrition formula inserted through a tube in their nose/mouth into their stomach/small intestines.
As determined by each patient’s individual condition, feeding tubes such as nasogastric, gastrostomy or jejunostomy may be used. They can be implanted either endoscopically, surgically or by radiology and most commonly use polymeric formulas which are easily digested; modular products for specific nutrient requirements (for instance higher protein formulas).
An RDN will help ensure your nutritional plan provides adequate amounts of vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fats and proteins. She can teach you how to properly clean and prepare equipment such as tubes for feeding purposes as well as troubleshoot common issues that arise with them. In addition, they may work with you on developing recipes tailored specifically to your calorie and nutrient requirements.
Supplements
Supplements offer small amounts of essential vitamins and minerals not easily obtained through diet alone, helping your body function at its best while helping prevent disease.
Diet is often the primary way of meeting nutritional requirements; however, some individuals require additional support through supplementation.
Malnutrition has dire consequences, including death, functional decline and extended hospital stays. International medical societies advise screening patients for malnutrition risk and providing nutritional support in order to optimize outcomes. Previous meta-analyses demonstrated the correlation between nutritional support and increased survival and non-critical hospital readmission rates among malnourished medical inpatients as well as reduced non-critical readmission rates from previous trials of low quality; newer higher-quality trials may alter these earlier results.
