Retirement Living Innovators first in the nation to become
Gluten Free Food Service Accredited (GFFS)
(Sun City, AZ)— GenCare Lifestyle is on a mission: to inspire their senior residents to make healthier choices so they can simply enjoy living. Instead of dealing with our aging by managing illness, Whole Life Living provides healthy lifestyle choices to promote health and wellness. It’s a completely new approach for delivering health and wellness to older adults.
Expanding upon its award winning Whole Life Living Culinary Program GenCare recognized that nearly 25 million people follow a gluten-free diet and over 60% of persons with celiac disease fear dining out. The Whole Food, Whole Life initiative is one element of the Seattle-based organization’s Whole Life Living wellness program. Leon Grundstein, founder and CEO; shares that you can’t live forever but you can live well, by making simple changes in your lifestyle.
It is a “staggering” challenge for retirement and assisted-living communities to feed large numbers of residents something delicious every day and keep them both healthy and satisfied, Grundstein observes. Yet “food is the foundation,” he says. “It fuels the engines of your heart and mind. Without a proper diet, the body will not function optimally.” GenCare’s professionally trained chefs prepare “tasty, nourishing meals for residents made from fresh, whole and organic natural foods,” according to Grundstein. Ingredients include such things as organic produce, free-range poultry, wild fish and natural beef. With this focus on whole life dining, the culinary initiative “supports older adults who want to be well and eat well,” he explains.
Nearly 25 million people in the US follow a gluten-free diet. The most common health challenges in mature adults include short-term memory problems, bone loss, anemia and general fatigue syndromes. The average of diagnosis is in mid-life, when people are also considering their future living situations. Until now, mature adults living gluten-free had no options for retirement facilities where they felt the facility could provide safe meals. Many times mature adults have been turned away because retirement communities didn’t know how to meet their nutritional needs. GenCare’s devotion to providing gluten-free as part of the Whole Life initiative is wonderful news to those wishing to live healthy with age, according to Cynthia Kupper, RD; Executive Director Gluten Intolerance Group of North America (GIG).
