Body Healthy. Soul Happy.

I have a friend who is studying to be a paramedic. Her father turned 80 this year and her mother is now 70. My friend decided to return to school to study Emergency Medical Services because of her parents advancing age and the high likelihood that sometime in the not too distant future she would be called upon to help provide care for them.

When my friend’s class began studying geriatric health it got her thinking and she came to me with some questions. I decided to write about our discussion because I’m sure that some of you out there in cyberville also have aging parents and some of the same concerns for your own family.

Question: My father has a history of stomach troubles and no longer gets the same enjoyment from eating as he used to. Even though my mother is a wonderful cook and prepares 3 meals a day, he eats very little and has lost a lot of weight over the years. It was recommended that my dad drink Ensure Plus as a nutritional supplement, but after looking at the ingredients, I wonder if that’s really a good idea. How does a drink like Ensure measure up to Herbalife’s Formula One Healthy Meal?

Answer: As you know, as a person ages, many things contribute to their loss of desire to eat. Ill fitting dentures can cause pain, the body produces less saliva which makes chewing and swallowing more difficult, our tongues lose taste buds, which makes food less enjoyable and our stomachs are often more sensitive to the foods we eat. We even make less of the amino acids that allow us to digest proteins. Good nutrition is even more important in our golden years, but nature often works against us. That’s why finding a superior nutritional supplement that is easy to ingest and enjoyable is so important for our seniors.

First of all, let’s get one fact out on the table (if you like puns, feel free to assume it was intended.) All the nutritional supplement drinks that are on the shelves of your local grocery store are what’s called “food grade” by the FDA, assuming they’ve even been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, which many haven’t. Food Grade products are allowed, by law, to contain up to a 30% variance in their actual nutritional contents versus what they print on the label. Keep in mind that companies do not usually put more of the good stuff and less of the bad.  Pharmaceutical Grade products on the other hand, have in the container what is on the label, nothing more, nothing less.

Now let’s look at the label of Ensure, knowing that it is a Food Grade product and that the actual nutrition contents may vary up to 30%.

(source: http://abbottnutrition.com/products/products.aspx?pid=14#top) 

Now let’s compare that to the nutritional Label of Herbalife’s Healthy Meal Formula One, which is Pharmaceutical Grade and therefore has less than a 1% degree of content variance (HF1 is allowed to be labeled a “Healthy Meal” by the FDA because it is a meal, unlike Ensure which must only use the term “supplement” because it does not meet the FDA criteria for a meal replacement):

As you can see there is quite a difference between the two products.  Even when made with one cup of non-fat vitamin A & D fortified milk the Formula One Healthy Meal contains only 180 calories and only 15 of them come from fat, as opposed to Ensure’s 355 calories, 103 of which come from the 11g of fat in the product. HF1 only has 1g of fat. Ensure contains 50g of sugar to Herbalife’s Formula 1 9 grams of sugar.

 Even for seniors who are not heavy or overweight, you want to be very conscious of the fat, cholesterol and sodium in their diet because of the the strain these can place on their hearts. Ensure has 5mg of Cholesterol, whereas HF1 has 0mg.  Ensure also packs 220mg of sodium to HF1’s 140mg. 

Potassium and protein are extremely important for seniors because they need to protect their muscle mass to remain active and mobile. Ensure and HF1 both offer 13g of protein but the cholesterol in the Ensure blocks the absorption of some of the protein and the Ensure actually offers about double the amount of potassium, but Herbalife’s Formula 1 has 37g fewer carbohydrates. The differences between the products continue on, but the bottom line comes down to this: while Ensure does contain important vitamins and nutrients, it is a food grade product and therefore not manufactured to same quality standards as HF1 and the amount of sugar and preservatives that are used in the production of Ensure greatly impact the product’s ability to truly be a healthy meal replacement for seniors, whose bodies are often very sugar sensitive and require more nutrition to continue to function properly than younger folks.