National Mocktail Week Helps Your Parents Embrace Healthier Habits
One of the biggest challenges for older adults can be giving up that pint of beer, a glass of wine, or a favorite cocktail. Yet, several of the more common prescription medications the elderly take have alcoholic beverages listed in the contraindications.
The second week of January is National Mocktail Week. It’s a good time to join your parents and embrace healthier habits. Here are some of the best ways to use mocktails to get your parents to give up their favorite dinner-time beverages, and how elder care can help.
What Are Your Parents Favorite Beverages?
What are your parents’ favorite cocktails? Your dad loves a gin and tonic. There are non-alcoholic gins on the market, or you could make it with fresh lime juice, tonic water, and ice. Your mom’s craving for a Moscow Mule is easily met with fresh lime juice, a stevia-sweetened ginger ale, soda water, and sprigs of mint.
If they love having a pint of beer with their dinner, look into hop oil. You can add some drops of hop oil to a glass of ice and seltzer. Look into sparkling grape juice for a glass of wine and mix it with some seltzer if it’s too sweet for them. There are also non-alcoholic wines that can be pretty convincing.
Make daiquiris using pureed frozen fruits, seltzer, and lime juice. If they miss the flavor of rum, use rum extract.
Skip the Sugar
When making mocktails for your mom and dad, pay attention to their dietary needs. If they are supposed to reduce their sugar intake due to diabetes, don’t use sugar syrup. Instead, use a sweetener like stevia drops and limit the amount used.
Use fresh fruits for sweetening drinks over sugar. The antioxidants are important. Pureed cherries add sweetness to a drink and count as one of their daily servings of fresh fruit.
Hire Elder Care to Keep Your Parents on Track
How well do your mom and dad do with their prescribed medicines? Do they take them on time or often forget a dose? If they do forget the dose, you can’t have them taking twice as much. If they skip some medications, it could impact their health. This is why elder care is one of the best things you can arrange.
Elder care aides stop by and remind your parents when to take their next dose. They have someone to track whether they’ve taken a pill or not. They won’t miss a dose or take too much because they don’t remember that they’ve already taken it. Call an elder care specialist to get started.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-aha-news-year-mocktail.html
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