The eating capability: constituents and assessments

With the rapid growth of elderly populations, the food industry is under increasing pressure to provide texture-modified food for safe consumption by these vulnerable populations. The imminent technical challenges to the manufacturing of food for elderly consumption are the lack of knowledge of the elderly’s physiological capability to eat and swallow and, particularly, the lack of technical guidance in matching texture properties with the individual’s capability of eating. This review proposes the term “Eating Capability” to represent the individual’s abilities for food consumption. This term collectively includes the following four groups of quantifiable parameters: food handling capability (e.g., hand gripping, finger gripping, and coordination), oral manipulation capability (e.g., lips sealing, biting and mastication, tongue pressing, and swallowing), oral sensing capability (e.g., tasting and texture discrimination), and cognitive capability (e.g., information seeking and processing, opinion forming, and decision making). According to this definition, various capacities related to eating performance and, particularly, the implications of any impairment in such capability are discussed in detail in this paper; we pay particular attention to vulnerable elderly consumers. Another primary objective of the review is to introduce feasible techniques and methods that are currently available for quantitative assessment of these parameters. With the growing research activities in food for elderly, we hope that this review will stimulate new thinking and help the food industry to establish novel techniques to design and manufacture quality food for safe consumption by elderly people.