Doughnut Debate Shows Problems in Senior Nutrition

MAHOPAC — It was just another morning at the William Koehler Memorial Senior Center: Women were sewing, men were playing pool — and seven demonstrators, average age 76, were picketing outside, demanding doughnuts. They wore sandwich boards proclaiming, "Give Us Our Just Desserts" and "They're Carbs, Not Contraband."

At issue is a decision to refuse free doughnuts, pies and breads that were being donated to senior centers around Putnam County. Officials were concerned that the county was setting a bad nutritional precedent by providing mounds of doughnuts and other sweets to seniors.

A coordinator of nutritional services for the county's Office for the Aging, Stan Tuttle, said the program had gotten out of control and as many as 16 cases a day of breads, cakes and pastries were being delivered, by various means, to the senior center each day. Some were moldy and some had been stored overnight in the trunks of volunteers' cars, he said.

Caregivers there and elsewhere say the doughnut debate illustrates the difficulty of balancing nutrition and choice when providing meals to the elderly.

The executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Michael Jacobson, said, "Senior citizens can walk down to the store and buy doughnuts. Nobody's stopping them."

But he notes that older people have high rates of heart disease and high blood pressure and says senior citizen centers, nursing homes and assisted-living centers should not be worsening the health problems of seniors.