Center for Nutrition, Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
Department of Nutrition, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
Am J Clin Nutr. 2020 Dec 10;112(6):1409-1414. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqaa341.
Social disparities in the US and elsewhere have been terribly highlighted by the current COVID-19 pandemic but also an outbreak of state-sponsored violence. The field of nutrition, like other areas of science, has commonly used 'race' to describe research participants and populations, without the recognition that race is a social, not a biologic, construct. We review the limitations of classifying participants by race, and recommend a series of steps for authors, researchers and policymakers to consider when producing and reading the nutrition literature. We recommend that biomedical researchers, especially those in the field of nutrition, abandon the use of racial categories to explain biologic phenomena but instead rely on a more comprehensive framework of ethnicity; that authors consider not just race and ethnicity but many social determinants of health, including experienced racism; that race and ethnicity not be conflated; that dietary pattern descriptions inform ethnicity descriptions; and that depersonalizating language be avoided.
美国和其他国家的社会不平等在当前的 COVID-19 大流行中被暴露无遗，同时也暴露出国家支持的暴力行为。营养学领域与其他科学领域一样，通常使用“种族”来描述研究参与者和人群，而没有认识到种族是一种社会而非生物的建构。我们回顾了按种族分类参与者的局限性，并为作者、研究人员和政策制定者提出了一系列步骤，供他们在撰写和阅读营养文献时考虑。我们建议生物医学研究人员，尤其是营养领域的研究人员，放弃使用种族类别来解释生物学现象，而是依赖于更全面的族裔框架；建议作者不仅考虑种族和族裔，还要考虑许多健康的社会决定因素，包括经历过的种族主义；建议不要将种族和族裔混为一谈；建议饮食模式描述告知族裔描述；并避免使用去人性化的语言。
