ONF: Enjoyment as the missing care function in impaired food intake
We have screening tools, assessments, protocols and all manner of guidance. What is missing from secondary and tertiary food care, however, is a domain that activates the driver of intake: the enjoyment of food and drink. This is an intensely individual positive hedonic response in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), elicited by pre-epiglottal oro-physicosensory perceptions within the gustatory, olfactory and trigeminal systems (GOT).
What is new?
ONF is the first care domain to give this pre-epiglottal GOT sensory experience, and the positive OFC response it produces, a recognised place in care. It brings gastrology together with clinical and medical practice in a single, integrated space for intervention. In doing so, ONF fills a structural gap in the architecture of care.
What are the benefits?
The positive OFC response—subjectively experienced as finding something delicious—acts as a driver of intake. This response is highly individual, is elicited by food and drink, and is influenced by contextual and circumstantial factors. By making this response available for professional intervention, ONF increases the likelihood of effective food intake and improved care outcomes for patients with impaired food intake.
Who is it relevant to?
ONF supports the work of dietitians, nurses, speech and language therapists, and physicians by adding a missing gastrological function to secondary and tertiary food care—precisely where intake problems are most acute: geriatrics, oncology, neurology, rehabilitation, residential care and home care.
ONF is an extension of Primary Food Care: a vertical expansion of gastrological functionality within an existing care architecture that needs this expertise to increase food intake and improve care outcomes. Above all, this extension creates room to address a structural problem: the decades-long persistence of malnutrition and undernutrition, caused by the absence of a pre-epiglottal space for intervention within secondary and tertiary food care. ONF makes that space available for the first time.
This extension does not establish a hierarchy; it is a marriage. EPC-based gastrology joins forces with clinical and medical practice, giving rise to new, impactful solutions for patients and clients with impaired food intake. These interventions are not only safe and nutritionally sound, but also palatable, edible in an oro-physicosensory sense, and appealing.
CRIGA—Center for Research and Implementation in Gastrology & Food Care—is the Transdisciplinary Foundry of ONF, a domain now being validated internationally by academic partners.