(Montreal) Nutrition students from the Université de Montréal will meet seniors to help them eat better, as part of a new knowledge transfer project whose spinoffs will eventually benefit everyone seniors in the province.
Posted at 12:30 p.m.
The first participants in the project are some 700 independent retirees from Sélection Retraite Rosemont. These seniors were surveyed last December regarding their topics of interest and their questions regarding food.
Conclusion: they are mainly interested in calcium and proteins, and these are the subjects that will be addressed by the students of the Montreal university.
“The objective of our project is to co-create, in collaboration with students and seniors, educational material based on their interests, then addressing the autonomous aging clientele”, summed up the project coordinator, Anne-Marie Lemieux, from the nutrition department of the Université de Montréal.
The students will produce multimedia content — educational posters, infographics for residence screens, video clips for social media — with a view, for example, to clarifying the role of calcium and proteins in bone health, or even the food sources of these nutrients, it was clarified by means of a press release.
The expertise of a master’s student in communication will also be called upon to ensure the most effective and complete message possible.
The survey conducted last fall enabled the project’s instigators to target not only the subjects most likely to interest seniors, but also how they wish to receive information.
“We know the elderly who are losing their autonomy very well, but we see less autonomous elderly people, so sometimes we have prejudices, we say, ‘Ah, in terms of IT, they’re going to be a little less skillful,” but at the end of the day, they are as skillful as 30-year-olds, Ms.me Villeneuve.
“So among the media they use, we wouldn’t have thought of it, but Facebook is a platform that is used. YouTube is used. These are things that we don’t know, that we wouldn’t have seen, that we wouldn’t have thought of. So that’s what surprised us, more than the areas of interest. »
The elders have also shown a keen interest in local food, and information will therefore be provided to them on this subject, she added. The same goes for indigenous medicinal plants.
The project is all the more relevant since seniors often have to adapt their diet as the years go by, for example in response to minor injuries such as heartburn that can suddenly appear, explained Ms.me Villeneuve.
“It’s more an adaptation of the diet than a difficulty eating,” she said. It is important to know that this clientele can be very active, they walk, cycle […] and she needs more input. So the objective is really to simplify, then to popularize this information, so that (seniors) can adapt their diet. »
The first video clips will focus on proteins. They will be offered to seniors at the Sélection Retraite Rosemont residence over the next few weeks, which will make it possible to validate that the message ― both in form and content ― meets their needs.
The content will then be offered to all seniors in Quebec, among other things through a new YouTube channel.
The knowledge transfer at the heart of this project will be two-way, said Ms.me Villeneuve. While it will provide seniors with new knowledge about nutrition, the female students who participate in it will also gain something from it, she pointed out.
“It has been shown in studies on waste, for example, on sustainable development, that the elderly are precursors, said Ms.me Villeneuve. These are people who don’t throw away a lot, who don’t really waste, so it’s really an exchange between the two and that’s what’s interesting, there’s a sharing of knowledge on one side and on the other. other. »
This three-year project is made possible thanks to a financial contribution of $630,000 from the Sélection Retraite group.