Abstracts

Rationale: The ketogenic diet(KD) is one of the therapies for intractable childhood epilepsy but the diet is difficult to maintain. The diet is restrictive and composed of high fat, and fat should be taken from not only food but also extra edible oil. So recipes and cooking methods were newly developed to improve the tolerance of the children to the diet therapy.Methods: A survey was carried out on parents who are responsible for preparing the KD. From the survey we found out that the most challenging problem to them is that their kids are not eating the meal well. And what is worse, they had limitations on cooking methods, and difficulties in choosing food materials. So we decided to organize a menu development team which holds weekly meeting for developing better the KD meal recipes. As a first step, we decided to focus on the KD meal in 4:1 ratio which is applied to most of our patients. We built recipes by calculating the amount of food in grams to achieve 4:1 ratio. With the recipes, the KD meals were cooked by a chef and blind tasting was performed by the menu development team. From the blind tasting, we adjusted the recipes and cooking methods.Results: The menus are classified by five groups and thirty three menus are developed up to now. The menus were verified by medical team through food tasting event. The developed menus are being served to our inpatients by six cycled menu. From our survey on patients who experienced the developed menus, they preferred the developed menus (64%) to the original ones (36%).Conclusions: In order to increase children and their parents satisfaction, recipes and cooking methods of the ketogenic diet were developed with better appetite, less resistance and improving preference.