Avaliação do índice resto-ingesta e sobras de refeições servidas a coletividade sadia e enferma de um hospital público do interior da Paraíba.

Abstract

Food waste in Food and Nutrition Unit runs the food chain and their causes involve economic, political, cultural and technological. The rest-intake and remains indices are quality indicators for the assessment of waste and promote research of the factors that interfere with their maintenance in order to correct them. Thus, the aim of this research was to evaluate the food waste based on rest-intake rates and food scraps from meals served to healthy and sick community of a public hospital in the interior of Paraíba. This is a cross-sectional study of quantitative character, held for two consecutive weeks of March, the Food and Nutrition Unit of the Paraíba inside the hospital. The sample consists of menus served to employees, caregivers and patients free diet. Clean surplus was determined from weighing on semi-industrial scale all produced preparations and not distributed in the general and special dietary requirements as well as leftover food from the staff / caregivers and patients, by discounting the weight of the utensils / containers and performing the disposal of bones, toothpicks, plastic, among other inedible. The values were recorded in spreadsheets for further comparative evaluation of results as per capita consumption, rest-intake total rest-intake per capita, per capita clean leftovers, percentage of leftovers and scraps and quantity of people fed with leftovers and scraps food. For the awareness campaign against waste after collection of the data was used illustrative posters and a banner in the cafeteria areas. For collective sick the rest-intake rate was adequate, with 13.26%; But the remains were above the recommended by the literature, reaching values of 28.74%. For healthy community, it was found that the rest-intake rate and leftovers were above the ideal, with values of 10.87% and 18.46% respectively of. At the end of 11 days of collection it was found that 160 people could be fed with the amount of debris and leftovers from healthy and sick community. The high waste rates suggest shortcomings in the presentation of preparations, lack of standardization of parts, per capitas over-estimated, refusal of meals not to assess the food preferences and lack of awareness of the diners. Therefore, we recommend the adoption of continuous educational measures in order to reduce the checked indexes, seeking an optimization of food production and quality of service.