Suarez Maka, Torres Carrasco María Elissa, Morales Diana, Kuritzky Amy, Abril Victoria, Encalada Lorena
Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography-Kaleidos (Universidad de las Américas - UDLA, Ecuador). UDLAPARK, Redondel del Ciclista, Antigua Vía a Nayón, Quito, EC, 170124, Ecuador.
Research group "Public Health, Food and Physical Activity in the Life Cycle." Faculty of Medicine, University of Cuenca, Av. 12 de abril y Av del Paraíso. Campus Paraíso, Cuenca, Ecuador.
Appetite. 2021 Oct 1;165:105289. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2021.105289. Epub 2021 May 9.
Elderly adults in southern Ecuador often distrust nutritionists' advice when implementing changes to their dietary practices. This distrust is no overt disregard for expert nutritional knowledge but rather the result of structural and situated practices that combine suspicion, misinformation, financial limitations, and family care. In this article, we examine eating practices among elderly adults in southern Ecuador in order to understand how nutrition distrust is constructed. In doing so, our aim is to understand how elderly adults incorporate-or not-expert nutritional knowledge into their eating practices. By ethnographically documenting daily eating practices among elderly adults in their homes, alongside expert nutritional discourses, our findings reveal that there is first, a local understanding of "eating healthy" connected to lived realities (e.g. farming practices, agricultural toxicity, age, education, polypharmacy, kinship ties), and second, a disconnect between expert nutritional knowledge and eating practices linked to how knowledge is produced and disseminated (e.g. power relations, scientific vocabulary, perceptions of health). Understanding how elderly adults build trust around eating can be a fertile ground for promoting more effective and suitable dietary advice among specific communities or groups like elderly adults.
厄瓜多尔南部的老年人在改变饮食习惯时，往往不信任营养学家的建议。这种不信任并非公然无视专业的营养知识，而是由怀疑、错误信息、经济限制和家庭照料等结构性及具体实际情况共同导致的结果。在本文中，我们研究了厄瓜多尔南部老年人的饮食习惯，以了解营养不信任是如何形成的。在此过程中，我们的目的是了解老年人如何将——或不将——专业营养知识融入他们的饮食习惯。通过人种志记录老年人在家中的日常饮食习惯，并结合专业营养论述，我们的研究结果表明，首先，当地对“健康饮食”的理解与生活现实（如农耕方式、农业毒性、年龄、教育程度、多种药物同时服用、亲属关系）相关；其次，专业营养知识与饮食习惯之间存在脱节，这与知识的产生和传播方式（如权力关系、科学词汇、健康观念）有关。了解老年人如何在饮食方面建立信任，可能为在老年人等特定社区或群体中推广更有效、更合适的饮食建议提供沃土。
