Asymptomatic HIV-infected individuals should follow the same dietary practices recommended for healthy people, but with added precautions. Because the HIV organism attacks the immune system, it makes a person more vulnerable to infections, including food poisoning from salmonella, shigella, campylobacter, and other bacteria. Such food-borne infections occur more frequently and are more severe in people with reduced immunity.
Keep up your food intake: AIDS is a wasting disease, and death is often due to starvation rather than to other HIV complications. A patient should eat as much as possible and, unless markedly obese, not worry about gaining weight. The extra weight can be critical in seeing a patient through a crisis when he can’t eat.
HIV-AIDS
Unfortunately, maintaining good nutrition is complicated by the ways in which AIDS affects the digestive system. It reduces absorption of nutrients, especially folate, riboflavin, thiamine, and vitamin B6 and B12; it often causes intractable diarrhea, which causes further nutritional loss; and it increases the risk of intestinal infections. Many AIDS patients also suffer appetite loss and bouts of nausea, either from the disease or from medications.
If rapid weight loss occurs, the patient may require artificial (hyperalimentation) feeding; this is generally administered through a gastric feeding tube inserted into the bloodstream. Some AIDS specialists advise artificial feeding if nutrients are not being absorbed properly.
We will continue our discussion about nutritional requirements, and food safety in patients suffering from AIDS in our next post.
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