296 – A Caregiver and Her Cookbook: How one woman’s caregiving journey inspired a cookbook for dysphagia care

Swallow Your Pride Podcast

Theresa Richard, MA, CCC-SLP, BCS-S

Education, Health & Fitness, Business, Careers, Medicine

4.8 • 899 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“It flipped the whole household upside down. None of our meal times are quote-unquote normal...it's totally dysfunctional chaos.”

☝️This is the real and raw experience of Diane Wolff, dysphagia cookbook author and caregiver for her mother with dementia and impaired swallowing. This experience led Diane to write Essential Puree - The A to Z Guidebook: 67 Delicious Recipes for the Dysphagia Diet & Soft Food Diet, a cookbook addressing this overlooked aspect of care, including tips on simplifying recipes, cleanup, and food storage for families dealing with time constraints or challenges.

In this episode of the Swallow Your Pride Podcast, Theresa and Diane discuss the caregiver’s journey and the need for more resources and solutions for loved ones living with dysphagia. From ditching food molds to piping puree onto colorful plates, Diane shares several of her recommendations to promote better dining experiences for everyone impacted by dementia and swallowing disorders.

If Med SLPs can agree on anything, it’s that food is more than sustenance. It’s a way to connect, share love, and find joy in life. This episode dives into all of that and more with vulnerability and forward-thinking.

Get the show notes: https://syppodcast.com/296

Timestamps:

The importance of nutrition for seniors with swallowing disorders [00:03:08]
Challenges of feeding a child with a feeding disorder [00:04:30]
Creating easy and nutritious pureed meals [00:05:25]
The importance of atmosphere and using pretty plates [00:10:07]
Using a xanthan gum thickener for food consistency [00:11:18]
Cooking the same recipe for the patient and the family [00:13:33]
The nutritional status of the speaker's mother [00:21:30]
Developing a line of pureed foods for hospitals and home healthcare [00:22:50]
Patient and caregiver education on pureed foods and tools for the kitchen [00:27:07]
Boosting the immune system during COVID [00:31:34]
Collaboration between speech pathologists and other professionals [00:32:17]
The caregiver's perspective [00:33:35]

The post 296 – A Caregiver and Her Cookbook: How one woman’s caregiving journey inspired a cookbook for dysphagia care appeared first on Swallow Your Pride Podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On this episode of the Swallier Pride podcast, we have Diane Wolf. She's a widely published
0:05.0	author and journalist. She gave up the literary life and became her mother's primary caregiver
0:09.5	when her mother was diagnosed with dementia and swallowing difficulties. Her friends thought she was crazy but
0:14.7	she thought it made her writing better. As a journalist Diane researched the available cookbooks and found them
0:19.8	unhelpful. She researched foods available commercially and found them boring and
0:23.8	tasteless. She interviewed health care professionals including physicians,
0:27.1	dieticians, and SLPs, nurses, and nurses' aides. She discovered that the
0:31.5	dysphagia kitchen was an overlooked area. She wrote the volume that she wished she had when her mother was first diagnosed.
0:38.0	She wrote a six book series, Purays of the season, with a different technique and ingredient for delicious puree. She follows the Harvard
0:45.4	Chan School of Public Health Healthy Eating Plate. She has won the caregiver friendly award from today's
0:50.4	caregiver magazine twice.
0:56.6	She regularly does virtual cooking classes and lectures. She's created a webinar for the National Foundation of Swallowing
0:58.9	Disorders on how to puree the Thanksgiving meal.
1:01.8	She is listed in the Sage Encyclopedia of Human Communication
1:04.8	and Communicative Disorders. Diane is developing a line of pureed frozen foods and is
1:09.6	working on a collection of her cookbooks for a major medical press. The website for the
1:13.8	essential puree library is essential puree.com. I hope you all enjoy this episode I
1:19.1	thoroughly love talking with Diane. It's such a she's such a strong advocate for her mother and why she got into this.
1:26.2	And you know, really, I know her passion just believes through with this conversation.
1:30.4	I hope you all enjoy it. I'm a board certified specialist in following and
1:44.1	swallowing disorders and founder of the Med-SLP collective and
1:47.7	Med SLP education.
	...

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