clinical focus
Accounting for taste
Rekindling a love of food
in older people.
Duika Burges Watson interviewed
by Conor Burke
L
oss of appetite and enjoyment of
food is a continuous struggle for
people in aged care, as well as those
who have faced serious illness such as
cancer and neurological disorders.
Altered eating – the term applied to
the inability to enjoy food and eat well
through illness – can have serious health
consequences and an overall impact on the
ability to fully enjoy life. For these reasons,
UK researcher Dr Duika Burges Watson is
intent on helping people to love food again.
26 agedcareinsite.com.au
“The key point is to raise the possibility
that sensory systems are not fixed and can
be improved with training,” Watson says.
“Putting joy back on the menu is
something I feel passionate about.”
Watson is the co-lead of the Altered
Eating Research Network in the UK and
recently visited Flinders University to
discuss some of her work. She spoke with
Aged Care Insite while she was here. For example, if you have a problem that
might involve the loss of control of muscles
in the mouth, you might find that you start
dribbling, and that makes it really difficult to
go out in public.
There can be a whole range of different
reasons why your eating is altered. That’s
what we’re trying to capture – all those
issues and how they impact you and the
way you live.
ACI: What’s the science behind why
we lose contact with food as we age or
when we experience illness? At Flinders University you presented
outcomes from two altered eating
studies you’ve been involved in. Can you
run through these?
DBW: Some of the issues can be physical.
It’s entirely possible that a lot of people
will lose, for example, their sense of smell,
which is so important to the experience of
food flavour.
Other people might have damage to the
tastebuds. For example, they might find
that suddenly food starts to taste metallic,
or they can’t experience sweetness in the
way they once did.
There can be all sorts of different
physical changes, but the other impacts
are social.
I started doing research about 12 years ago
with survivors of head and neck cancer.
These were people who’d been through
treatment and come out the other side,
and everything seemed fabulous.
But for some of the people we were
working with, they found that returning
to normal eating was impossible. So we
started working closely with them and a
research chef to try and better understand
what it was like for them living with an
eating difficulty, and then to see if we could