My regular readers will remember a ways back I blogged about the QEII hospital in Halifax where a cardiology resident wrote an opinion piece about the state of the cafeteria's food there.
Well, I've decided to take a tour of our local hospitals and last week I took advantage of being at the Ottawa Heart Institute (OHI) giving a talk and I brought my new toy - it's a Flip video camera that's roughly the size of a cell phone that dead easy to use and at least a little bit inconspicuous.
My goal was to record the dietary fare at the OHI. The picture of the frying bacon on the grill above in the Heart Institute's Cafeteria (named Tickers) sums things up fairly well, but I'll run it down for you a bit further.
One of the first things you see when you walk through the Heart Institute's main doors is a Tim Horton's replete with its many varieties of deep fried donuts. More interesting are their non-donut options - here's a smattering along with some of their nutritional information:
Sausage, Egg and Cheese Breakfast Sandwich - 500 calories, 34grams of fat and 920mg of sodium.
Turkey Bacon Club - 440 calories, only 8 grams of fat and a blood pressure bursting 1730mg of sodium (that's more than Blood Pressure Canada recommends in an entire day for a healthy individual let alone a patient at the Heart Institute)
Hearty Vegetable Soup - 70 calories, 0.4 grams of fat and, wait for it, 1,060mg of sodium
In fact if you were a patient or a visitor at the OHI and you didn't particularly like the cafeteria or the hospital's food and instead decided to eat at Tim Horton's for breakfast, lunch and dinner and you chose the options with the lowest amount of sodium, you'd still almost certainly consume over 3,000mg of sodium. If you weren't being careful it'd be no trouble at all to clear 4,000mg.
Ok, so maybe an argument could be made that Tim Horton's is just there for snacking rather than meals and that instead OHI's Tickers has the healthy fare.
If only that were true.
Eat at Tickers too often and heaven help your tickers. While there may be a healthy option here or there, the bulk of the food served at Tickers is junk food. Burgers, fries, pop, ice cream, pastries etc., and I could not find a nutritional breakdown anywhere. That's really a shame given that many of the folks eating at Tickers will be patients and their relatives, all of whom clearly have risk factors for heart disease and therefore don't need to incur any additional dietary peril - I wonder if they'd appreciate a means with which to evaluate their choices?
Hey Heart Institute MDs - isn't sodium something you recommend we reduce?
Certainly the hour long lecture entitled "Salt and Hypertension" available on your website suggests you do.
Funny, I didn't see a slide that suggesting folks reduce their dietary salt intake by avoiding the food sold at the Heart Institute!
Below's a choppy video tape I took at the OHI. Hopefully I'll get more skilled with the equipment as this series progresses.
(Future editions of this series will cover the Ottawa Civic, the Ottawa General, the Queensway Carleton, the Royal Ottawa and the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario.)
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Unfortunately, this is Par For The Course, where cafeterias are concerned. The same issues of customer desires, shelf life, and profit margins exist at hospitals and company cafeterias as they do in Real Life. Lobbying for healthier foods does not help if you're the only one requesting them, and boycotting (choosing to spend your food dollars elsewhere) only seems to force them to move in even more unhealthy foods (and chain restaurants) as they struggle to remain financially feasible.
ReplyDeleteIn the online diabetes communities I frequent, I've heard from many fellow diabetics that the diets they have been served while hospitalized for reasons related to diabetes -- were completely INappropriate for diabetics (tons of white flour, hydrogenated oils, mashed potatoes with tons of salt, etc.) It is as if the hospital either had no nutritionist or dietician, or had no nutritionist or dietician overseeing patient meals in the kitchen.
What seems to make it even harder to find "appropriate meals" outside the home (in general) is that everyone sees a different "diet" as appropriate for his/her condition (either personally or stereotypically), making it logistically more difficult to provide anything more than the least common denominator and to condition everyone to accept that as "normal and acceptable".
If only there were some realistic way to educate the people and drive the market...
The sad fact is that they sell that type of food because that's what their customers want to buy. Although I agree with you that there should be healthy options easily available on the menu(s), the absence of the same does not mitigate the personal responsibility of the people who chose that bill of fare.
ReplyDeleteWhen I have to visit friends in hospitals, when I go someplace where the food is suspect, even when I fly, I pack a lunch for myself (and typically my friends) for the event. Not only is it cheaper and healthier, but the truth is that it tastes better than what is generally available for purchase.
And trust me, the people around me (us) who are watching us eat are painfully aware of the difference.
The issue of dietary fare goes beyond Timmies and the cafeterias.
ReplyDeleteI think every hospital should be forced to serve healthy fare to patients, food that is also made available in the cafeterias for visitors and staff to eat.
It might mean a slimmer profit margin but I really don't understand why this isn't the case. Hospitals are supposed to be about "healthy" - right?
Bad hospital food for patients is the norm. My MIL was recently a patient at a local hospital. The food she was served was awful. She couldn't eat it - which is terrible considering she needed nourishment to get better. While I was there I looked around at what else was available, what I saw was trays and trays of white bread.
p.s I caught part of this series on CBC radio. It's not about hospital cafeteria food per se - it's more about food for patients - worth a listen.
The child of friends of ours was in the hospital for two weeks. The parents were constantly at the hospital, leaving only when absolutely necessary.
ReplyDeleteI dropped by with salad, yogurt, fresh fruit, bottled water, and fresh bread. Afterwards, they told me that those were the first vegetables they had in a week!
How is that possible? They were very concerned for their own health because any illness would cancel their visiting rights.
Were healthy options available? Were healthy options priced out of their range, not appealing or cheap unhealthy food was more accessable? It concerns me that the parents could take care of themselves with healthy food.
I live in Minneapolis, MN, USA and at the Abbott Northwestern Hospital which houses one of our premier cardiac care centers, the main place to eat is a McDonalds. It's appalling.
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