Food shopping issues

If you haven’t taken over your elderly parent’s food shopping or insisted on going with them, you may want to start. Not only will they start to buy things they already have in abundance but they won’t buy the things they need, such as fresh food. 

Overbuying

My Mom was constantly overbuying things she already had. At one point, I counted 15 boxes of garbage bags, 5 jars of peanut butter, and enough paper towels to last a lifetime all in her garage storage cabinet. The problem is, that your elderly parent may forget to make a shopping list before they go food shopping. Then, when they go shopping they walk around the store putting things in their cart “just in case” they need them. This is not only a waste of money but, if it’s food, it can turn into a lot of wasted food because there’s no way they can drink 6 half gallons of milk before the milk expires.

Expired food

I was horrified the first time I went through my Mom’s freezer and saw food with expiration dates of over a year ago. This made me take a closer look at all the food in her pantry and refrigerator. It was quite an eye-opener to see food in her pantry that was over 3 years past its expiration dates.  

Healthy food

If you don’t do the food shopping or insist on going with them, it is very likely that they will not make healthy choices when it comes to the food that they buy. Eating healthy can be even more important for an elderly parent because they will likely have certain dietary needs such as foods that high in certain vitamins that they need. Or, they may have developed certain allergies such as lactose intolerance where they can’t have anything with dairy in it. At one point, my Mom lost 15 pounds in 3 months because she was having a lot of digestive issues. So I brought her to the doctor and it turned that she developed a lactose intolerance. Once I got rid of all the dairy products in her kitchen and bought some Lactaid pills, her weight digestive issues went away and her weight leveled off.