nursing nutrition 2024-2025

Nurses help patients recover from illness and surgery, teach patients how to best manage chronic illness through healthy food choices, and advocate for healthy eating to prevent disease. Obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease can be avoided with healthy eating. Because it is easier to stay healthy than it is to become healthy after a disease has set in, nurses give patients the tools they need to keep their health by actively encouraging healthy eating habits. Even if a patient is experiencing nausea or a lack of appetite during their recovery from illness or surgery, nurses employ strategies to encourage healthy eating. If a patient develops a chronic condition, the nurse instructs them on prescribed diets that can assist in disease management, such as a low-carbohydrate diet for diabetics or a low-fat, low-sodium, low-cholesterol diet for cardiovascular patients.

Additionally, nurses represent patients with conditions that can result in nutritional deficiencies. For instance, a nurse might be the first to notice that a patient is having trouble swallowing during mealtime and push for a swallow study to stop aspiration. In addition, a nurse may identify additional psychosocial risk factors that put a patient at risk for malnutrition in their home environment and make the necessary referrals to improve their nutritional status. Enteral (tube) and parenteral (intravenous) feedings, for instance, are also administered by nurses.

NUTRITION

Although eating has a significant impact on one’s psychosocial and cultural life, the primary functions of food intake are to supply the nutrients cells need to grow and develop and to replace substances cells need to function properly. Chapter 33 provides information regarding the digestion and absorption of food and nutrients. After the digested nutrients are absorbed into the blood and lymph, they are sent to the cells for further chemical processing, which results in the release of the energy needed for the body to function. The metabolism process turns the nutrients into chemical forms that are used to make energy and build new tissue. Anabolism, also known as the constructive phase of metabolism, is the process by which simple nutrients are transformed into more complex substances that cells can use. and catabolism, also known as the destructive phase, in which these complicated substances are reformed into simpler forms in order to release the energy required for the operation of cells.

All of the processes by which the body uses food for energy, maintenance, and growth are referred to as nutrition. Over the course of a person’s life, their dietary needs change. Periods of rapid growth in infancy and adolescence, pregnancy and lactation, increased physical activity, and times of stress, disease, or trauma are all factors that increase the body’s metabolic demand. Age decreased physical activity, and a reduced need for energy all decrease metabolic requirements.

The body’s capacity to ingest and digest food, absorb nutrients from the intestine, and eliminate waste products are all important factors in ensuring adequate nutrition. Additionally, a client’s current and future health status is significantly influenced by the quality and quantity of the food they consume. Maintaining health necessitates eating a diet rich in the necessary nutrients for each stage of life.

A client’s eating pattern is influenced by many things, including

Availability of food
• Economic status
• Influences such as family, or advertising
• Food fads and fallacies
• Cultural and ethnic beliefs and values
• Social and emotional aspects of food
• The client’s physical or mental state, such as having an allergy or intolerance to particular foods or nutrients, having trouble chewing or swallowing, having a low level of independence, or having disorders that interfere with nutrition and cause maldigestion, malabsorption, or loss of nutrients, which can cause emotional states like depression or anxiety.

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nursing nutrition 2024-2025

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