My Response to The New York Times Article
Corn syrup and maltodextrin... just to name a few ingredients of a typical oral nutritional supplement. A bottle of oral nutritional supplement typically contains about 20 to 23 grams of sugar. Sounds terrible, right? Yes, making fruit smoothies with yogurt may be a great substitution for conventional liquid oral nutritional supplement. All the fresh ingredients and probiotics in one drink. Imagine all of your patients getting one of these smoothies everyday. It would take three extra full-time equivalents just to make smoothies all day. In reality, it's not economical, it's ideology. The idea of telling my acutely sick patients to only eat healthy food seems to be the equivalent of telling my patient who did not eat well for days to just eat a celery stick because it's healthy. When one is sick, they often lose his/her appetite and eat inadequately. A high protein, high calorie liquid oral nutrition supplement becomes a quick fix to such patient. But an experience...