Compensatory Strategies for Older People:
A common compensatory strategy for dysphagia is texture modification. Successful TMF should provide the elderly with pleasurable experiences and safe consumption. There are typically three levels of food texture modification offered to people with dysphagia. They move from soften foods, through chopped and minced foods, to pureed foods.
Even within the group of healthy, independent older people, the influence of specific texture modifications on food preferences have shown to be highly variable. For example, for a white cream soup, increased thickness had negative influence on hedonic ratings of healthy elderly aged 60. Thus, the effects of the textural characteristics on elderly's preferences appear to be both product- and segment-dependent. The segment of elderly with dysphagia is a rather large and has greatest need for TMF
The addition of one or more irritant at around threshold level has been advised as a potential counteraction strategy to age-related changes of flavour preferences
(i) The belief is that the irritant enrichment can provide more dimensions to people's eating experience
(ii) This may not be a very sufficient strategy based on existing studies. It was reported that the addition of two levels of irritant (0.9 and 1.8 ppm capsicum solution) to cheese flavoured waffle both had no influence on the elderly's preferences, higher irritant addition can in some case even decrease preference for most elderly
Compensatory Strategies With No Effect
(i) Awareness of their own diminished orosensory changes varied among older people, since the deterioration of orosensory (oral senses) systems occurs gradually as people age and some elderly can habituate to sensory losses continuously
(ii) The older people may counteract the losses with the help of former food experience, mental images and related-memory. Moreover, detection of novelty and change based on their own food memory (“misfit”) might even influence their acceptance of sensory modified foods negatively
The variety in the influences of strategies on elderly's food preferences can be due to the various food systems used in different cases. From an applied perspective, this suggests caution in generalising results from one product category to another in product development and optimisation efforts.