Avaliação da aceitação de dietas para crianças internadas no Hospital Universitário Lauro Wanderley: aceitação dos alimentos servidos de forma convencional X aceitação dos alimentos servidos com base no empratamento lúdico.

Abstract

Hospital gastronomy has been widely used in public and private hospitals. Its concept is focused on providing individual and sensorially appealing food for patients, using appropriate culinary techniques, based on the food plan, maintaining nutritional status and working positively in the treatment. It is seen that hospital meals usually have the taboo of being bad, tasteless, and visually unattractive, resulting in low acceptance and high re-intake, with children being one of the groups most affected by this problem. Given this problem, a qualitative evaluation was carried out with children hospitalized at the Lauro Wanderley University Hospital to verify the acceptance of the lunch, with weighing performed at two moments: the first without visual modification and the second with some playful attraction, also using the facial hedonic scale to evaluate the acceptance of the proposed modification. A total of 22 meals were analyzed, with 7 of them visually modified. As a result, the acceptance rate for the unmodified meals was 56.06%, and after the visual change was made, this number increased to 71.28%. The use of simple gastronomic techniques, such as playful plating, significantly increases the acceptance of the diet, acting as an ally in the treatment of the children studied, resulting in a high quality prognosis.