Ingredients in Hospital Food Are a Threat to the Patients as Well as Our Planet, New Study Says

Being trapped inside a hospital ward is unpleasant mainly because of the bland, boring, and unseasoned food. All the spice, sugar, and salt are avoided because scientists believe they irritate your gut. However, this repulsive feeling in patients seemingly holds a speck of scientific truth within it, apart from the obvious lack of taste. In a recent study published in The Lancet Planetary Health, researchers revealed that the food served in most hospitals could be negatively affecting the patients’ health as well as our environment.

The research was conducted by a team of researchers led by Lisa Pörtner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), in collaboration with colleagues at Charité in Berlin and Stanford University. The team analyzed two German hospitals and three nursing homes, only to discover that their menus were shockingly loaded with refined grains, added sugars, salts, and saturated fats. Also, the meals served to patients lacked raw, wholesome food content such as whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits, which means the patients eating these meals weren’t receiving sufficient nutrition.

Poor nutrition affects the patients

The consequences of malnutrition aren’t just limited to hospital patients, but to anyone and everyone. Each component of nutrition is like a brick that the human body needs to remain fueled up for survival and growth. Even if one brick is broken, chipped away, damp, or crumbly, the entire bodily system would collapse sooner or later. In hospitals, particularly, malnutrition is often caused by a prolonged stay. Study researchers reflected upon the hospital patients, noting that they are often victims of infections triggered by lower immune function.

The more their meals lack essential nutrition, the lower their immune function sinks on the health graph, often stirring up diseases, slower wound healing, and, as a result, longer rehabilitation costs. Looking from this perspective, neglected hospital meals don’t just affect an individual patient, but cripple entire families with a tangle of dilemmas ranging from soaring bills and everyday costs. Not just the health, the emaciating hospital food also ends up programming the patients’ brains with a destructive food choice pattern. They are quite likely to repeat the foods they ate in the hospital at home, which means they will continue eating foods that were low on the nutrition scale.  

Doctors can lead the change

If a doctor recommends healthy, nutritious food, like a plant-based diet, for their patient, the entire hospital, including its cafeteria, would consider the same level of nutrition while preparing meals. But when a doctor neglects their duty, the entire hospital follows this neglectful tendency, paying no attention to what they are serving on the plate.

What did researchers find?

In this study, researchers tallied every breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack served over a representative week in the selected hospitals and nursing homes. Upon comparing the nutrient content with the standards mentioned in the Planetary Health Diet, they discovered startling discrepancies. None of the institutions reached even 20 percent. In most of them, the only source of calorie content was refined grains. The residents also lacked protein. “We found that meals contained too few healthy plant-based foods such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes,” Pörtner said in a press release.

The meals weren’t just boring and undernourished; they were also detrimental to the environment. Meat and dairy alone were generating three-quarters of the hospital’s greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution. Concluding the study, the researchers listed some alternatives hospitals can consider for their patients’ meals, including flavorful legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, protein-rich lentil shepherd’s pie, fiber-rich vegetables, peanut butter, soymilk, and fortified cereals, among others.

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