Trump’s cuts to nutrition programs will put older adults at risk

March is National Nutrition Month, a time to promote good nutrition throughout the lifespan — and to raise greater public awareness and action about the growing problem of malnutrition, especially among older adults.

While much time and attention is focused on access to nutritious food, not enough is focused on the importance of what exactly constitutes good nutrition. Malnutrition, simply stated, happens when people do not receive the proper nutrients in their daily diet, leading to significant health problems and loss of muscle mass.

{mosads}The US spends $51.3 billion per year on malnutrition in older adults, and a malnourished person’s healthcare costs can increase by 300 percent. It’s also estimated that as many as one in three patients is malnourished upon admission to the hospital. These are startling numbers we must address.

Malnutrition can affect someone who lacks access to healthy foods or someone who lacks the knowledge about how to obtain proper nutrients as an older adult. Malnutrition can occur in obese people as well as in the frail and underweight. These problems often go unnoticed until more serious health consequences are detected.

One way to detect and prevent malnutrition is to strengthen malnutrition care in clinical settings. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should strongly consider clinical quality measures, such as those proposed by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, that would aid in the early detection and prevention of malnutrition.

By detecting malnutrition early in a clinical setting, community programs can then work to stop malnutrition more effectively when a patient is released. This ultimately saves money on readmissions.

As we begin National Nutrition Month, we have looming new threats to the funding for key nutrition programs which help prevent malnutrition in older adults. To detect and prevent malnutrition, we must work to ensure the programs that are promoting good nutrition and nutrition education remain strong through funding and other means.

President Trump’s proposed $54 billion cut to non-defense programs will inevitably impact important nutrition programs for older adults, such as the Older Americans Act nutrition programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP).

The Older Americans Act (OAA) nutrition programs, provided through the Department of Health and Human Services, include congregate meals, which are meals offered at senior centers and in other group settings, and home-delivered meals, more commonly known as Meals on Wheels. OAA nutrition programs serve more than 2.4 million older adults each year.

These extremely cost-effective meals prevent unnecessary trips to the emergency room and delay or eliminate entirely the need for nursing home care, thus saving estimated billions of dollars to Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, a senior can be fed Meals on Wheels for an entire year for about the same average cost as one day in a hospital. To cut these programs would be to cut off vital nutrition lifelines for our nation’s older adults, potentially making them malnourished and food insecure.

Several programs through the Department of Agriculture also serve older adults. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) serves over 4 million older adults each year — and only 42 percent of eligible older adults enroll in SNAP due to participation barriers.

The Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) provides 600,000 older adults each year with healthy food boxes to supplement their diets. The USDA also runs the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program (800,000 older adults), the Child and Adult Care Food Program (120,000 older adults) and more. Cuts to these programs would be devastating for low-income older adults who depend on these programs for food.

This National Nutrition Month is a time for all of us to work together on saving these nutrition programs and strengthening malnutrition care. As lives grow longer and seniors remain more active much later in life, let’s not have their quality of life impacted by something as preventable as lack of access to good nutrition.

Bob Blancato is executive director of the National Association of Nutrition and Aging Services Programs.

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