Framing the Latin American nutrition transition in a historical perspective, 1850 to the present

• Autor(a) principal: Ablard,Jonathan D.
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: História. Ciências. Saúde-Manguinhos
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-59702021000100233
• topic: nutrition transition; nutrition history; obesity; foodways

Abstract This paper argues that many of the foundations and trends that led to the rise in obesity and other diet-related health problems in Latin America began to develop in the late nineteenth century. The tendency towards presentism in the nutrition transition literature provides a much abbreviated and limited history of changes in diet and weight. Whereas medical and nutrition researchers have tended to emphasize the recent onset of the crisis, a historical perspective suggests that increasingly global food sourcing prompted changes in foodways and a gradual “fattening” of Latin America. This paper also provides a methodological and historiographic exploration of how to historicize the nutrition transition, drawing on a diverse array of sources from pre-1980 to the present.