Nourish to Flourish; Using food to support healthy aging

Welcome back, everybody, to Real Milwaukee. Well, wouldn't we all love a few tips to help us age gracefully? I know I would. Yes, absolutely. We've got Chef Michael Davis and Kevin Sarto here from New Perspective with how they help older adults maintain their health as they age. Certainly an important topic today. I would think so. Right? It's one of the most important conversations we have in our community. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you guys for being here. Yep. Um, just what are our tips for, um, I guess all ages, but especially, you know, as you get a little bit older, just the simplest tips for us, for, for, for us is, uh, you have to talk to the residents. You have to, you have to get out in front of them and see, uh, what their desires are when, when they're moving before they move in. We actually like to have these conversations with them, um, just so that we can understand how to mold our, our, our menus. We change our menus three times a year. We have a dining room menu so we can make pivots where needed, additions, subtractions, and then also, too, working with our vendors and our dieticians. Usually with me, I'm on the menu development team, so usually where the menu starts, definitely that's not where it ends because the dietician is scratched off so many things because of, you know, dietary needs and sodium and things like that, but we understand. I'm sure there are so many needs within that community, too. I'm sure everybody is different. Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, that's just us learning, us working with our other leadership in the building and just really understanding our residents. And then getting that experience, then you'll just kind of know how to get that nutrition over to the residents. But then you've got to make sure you like it, too. Face is equally as important. I love that it's kind of a reminder here about the plate, because often when we talk about aging gracefully, I think people go to skin care or those types of treatments. But really what you consume and what you're putting in your body makes such a difference as well. So you've brought us some ways that we can age gracefully through food. Walk us through the menu. Yeah. So, you know, our residents eat with their eyes as well. You know, it's not just us. So we want to try to make sure we're focusing on our plating. So we have a soup bowl that we put on. I worked with it this summer. You know, residents really appreciate it. They liked it. We put it on the menu and we'll just see what happens. This one's going to be a little different. it may be on our next menu cycle but it's a mole chicken and we added a latin rice on our menu this year so also to a poached salmon which is another a different cooking technique with using a you know a stock to cook your salmon down it holds the moisture in and has a sweet pea coulis and then i wanted to just show a stir fry to kind of tie in with our activities and our life engagement because some of our communities have we have the commercial kitchen some other kitchens out in the dining room though you can use and it's nice to get out in front of the residents actually do live cooking we'll do omelet bars pasta bars stir-fry bars and things like that and we usually tie that in with a some kind of activity but working working with our activity coordinators um do that so uh it's another nice experience that we have you know for our residents and that is equally important right yeah being social being with other residents And that that has to be a big part of aging gracefully, too. Yeah. And like Michael said, at the time of moving is where we're obtaining a lot of that information. We're getting life stories. We're getting histories. We're getting, you know, occupations. And then we can team them up with other individuals as well and really do person centered activities, you know, engage them in that socialization meal prepping. we do a lot of a lot of activities with meals yeah you know well it's it's it's sometimes the only only time residents come out of their rooms yeah it's a really really big um socializing time so we want to make sure we're giving them a good experience when they're coming out and then we want them to keep coming out absolutely you know so i love the idea of having you know a full social calendar especially because that's the time of your life where you have the freedom you have The availability, fill it up with different activities, especially as we talk about wanting to age gracefully. Maybe one of those activities should be some exercise, some movement. Is that helpful here? Yeah, actually, studies have shown that as we age, there's a reduction in our muscle mass. So by exercising daily, by doing all the range of motion exercises, keeps us healthy, moving the blood flowing, reduces risk of falls, maintains independence, and so on and so forth. Every morning, 9, 9.30 in the morning, we've got, I don't know, 20, 25 people there sitting and just doing chair exercises, lifting little weights and things like that. It's pretty neat to see. Even just walking the building. Yeah. Oh, sure. You know, just walking the buildings and getting that exercise. But we make sure we give them their meals so that they have their exercise. Right, exactly. They're ready to go. It's very clear that you guys care a lot about your residents. If anybody is interested in looking into New Perspective, what exactly would they do? We can just look on our website at mpseniorliving.com. It'll have a list of all of our communities and all the local areas. It'll have information about us, about the leadership, and we'll set up any kind of appointments for them and get them moving forward. That's great because I have to imagine, too, that's a big step when you get to that age for a resident and family alike. So to see even just the simplicity of how much you put into each meal, that has to be really reassuring. And that's why we asked, you know, we that's why we we teamed up with our marketing team. We wanted to we want our culinary team also to come out of the come out of the kitchen during these tours and then just kind of give a three to five minute pitch, you know, about the culinary department just to kind of create that comfortability because it's a nervous time. It's like from eighth grade to a freshman year where my daughter is going here soon or, you know, after high school to college. It's just a really tough time, so we just want to kind of create that connection and get that stuff. And show them, you know, it can be tough, but then it can be really exciting. Once you're there and you realize this is the right spot for me, I'm getting a gourmet meal, I'm hanging out with social hours, getting my exercise in, people can absolutely thrive. And speaking of social hours, can I ask real quick, are residents going to be watching the World Series? Oh, absolutely. Oh, yes! Yeah, that was a conversation in one of our meetings yesterday. We were like, oh, goodness. Yeah, hey is the pub gonna be open? Yeah, absolutely everyone likes a good old-fashioned like their spirits Yeah, yeah, I am loving this Thank you both so much for being here. No problem. All right. We have a bit more coming up on real Milwaukee We'll be right back