Purpose of Therapeutic Dietary Adaptations
A therapeutic diet is a quantitative/ qualitative modified version of a basic nutritious diet which has been tailored to suit the changing nutritional needs of a patient/ disease condition. The regular or normal diet may be modified for one or more of the following reasons:
To maintain or restore optimum nutritional status,
To provide rest or relieve an affected organ (e.g. soft or liquid diet in gastritis),
To adjust to the body's ability to digest, absorb, metabolize or excrete (e.g. a low fat diet for fat malabsorption),
To adjust to tolerance of food intake by mouth (e.g. tube feeding for patients with cancer of oesophagus),