Problems with food choices in the elderly: Transportation and physical mobility as barriers to quality of diet in seniors attending senior centers

Seniors, previously considered a homogeneous rather small group with a short age span, are today a very heterogeneous group whose ages span several decades. Their diets have changed too, but not necessarily for the better.;Nutrition education cannot be effective if there are barriers to practicing its precepts. Two such barriers, rarely studied in relation to seniors' actual food choices, are the availability of transportation and seniors' physical mobility. This multi-dimensional, cross-sectional, correlational study used a questionnaire to examine how physical mobility and transportation affected the food choices made by seniors. It used a food-based standard of food quality based on published data to designate foods as more healthful and less healthful, and scored foods according to a scoring scheme also based on published data.;Connecticut senior centers, a population of free-living (not homebound) seniors whose food intakes therefore were most likely to reflect personal choice, met the requirements for the sample population for this study. Organizers at the senior centers that participated (55% of the total in the state) completed a two-page organizer's questionnaire and distributed a three-part, self-administered questionnaire (content and format derived from published sources) to the first 40 seniors attending on a single day. Three overall categories of data were collected: General Information (income, health factors, lifestyle factors, seniors' perceived problems); Measures of Access (personal mobility, transportation-dependent mobility, personal plus transportation-dependent mobility); and Measures of Diet Quality (an eight-part food frequency list).;Frequency data provided descriptive information within all three categories. The scoring scheme devised gave credit for variety and frequency for all appropriate food, personal mobility and transportation measures. Analyses of variance and correlations and tests of significance were done to examine potentially significant relationships on the measures of eight groups of foods and three types of transportation, as well as an overall food quality score and an overall mechanical transportation score.;Those analyses show that, for all food groups, the more places seniors go to, the more their food intake is likely to contain the more-healthful foods. This finding supports the hypothesis that seniors with more access to mechanical transportation will have a higher quality diet than seniors whose access to mechanical transportation is restricted in some way.