Impact of dietary counselling on the nutritional status of patients suffering from diseases related to life style modifications

Nutrition and diet is now in the integral and the most essential component of healthy living in today’s world. Lack of awareness towards the advantages of nutritious diet and lifestyle pattern is becoming the major threat for human life. Proper and focused diet counselling plays a major preventive and curative role in various diseases. This correlational study was carried out in the time period of three months span amongst the OPD patients. Subjects were selected on the basis that the dietary modifications in their disease conditions played a very significant role. Inclusion criteria also included the condition that patient should be the regular visitor to the diet clinic of OPD and maintained their clinical and biochemical profiles record. Detailed pre dietary counselling and their eating pattern as an individual and family as unit were observed. During post counselling sessions efforts were made to encourage the patients and their family to explain and suggest about nutritional and lifestyle modifications by their own. In the present study it was observed that the respondents knew their food as one of the basic need but how food could be of therapeutic help was a new concept to them. Nutritional component of the food was totally missing as it was clearly indicated in their responses. The impact of the counselling was visible and could be identified by the responses of the respondent in the post counselling sessions. Another important factor observed was that their improved biochemical and anthropometric parameters helped to motivate them and reinforced the benefits of diet counselling amongst the patients and their families.