Addition Of Sauce Enhances Finger-Snack Intake Among Japanese Elderly People With Dementia

Abstract

Purpose

The previous study demonstrated that the addition of a sauce is an effective means of influencing the consumption of finger foods among French elderly people with dementia. However, it is unclear the relative importance of low-level sensory factors such as flavor and a semi-solid nature and high-level cognitive factors such as memory stimulation and familiarity to the effect of the addition of sauce on food intake. The present study investigated whether the addition of sauce affects finger-snack intake among Japanese elderly people with dementia who were not familiar with sauce dipping.

Patients And Methods

A total of 21 patients with dementia who were recruited in a nursing home in Tokyo received a plate of cut baumkuchen (a very thinly layered German roll cake), which had pieces of baumkuchen both with and without sauce, at their afternoon snack time. The amount of food intake and the first choice between options were measured for each participant. We used chocolate (in Experiment 1, n = 21) and agave (Experiment 2, n =14) syrups as sauce samples.

Results

Results of both experiments demonstrate that snack consumption was greater for the with-sauce options than for the without-sauce options. A 90.5% of the participants in Experiment 1 and 64.3% of participants in Experiment 2 ate more snacks with sauce than without sauce.

Conclusion

These findings imply that low-level sensory factors such as flavor and a semi-solid nature contribute relatively more strongly to the enhancement of food consumption with the addition of sauce than do high-level cognitive factors such as memory stimulation and familiarity, because Japanese elderly people are not always familiar with the custom of wiping up the sauce with food.

Keywords:

• food consumption
• dementia
• under nutrition
• food improvement
• sauce

Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to all participants and staff at the nursing home involved. We would like to acknowledge Ms. Kimika Ishikawa, Ms. Masumi Hayashi, Ms. Minami Osumi and Mr. Teppei Takemiya for their assistance and to English Language Consultation Services for examination of the manuscript. This work is supported in part by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science 18K02193.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.