Institute of Geography, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico.
Research Centre on Environmental Geography, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Morelia, Mexico.
PLoS One. 2023 Oct 17;18(10):e0288235. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288235. eCollection 2023.
What people eat affects public health and human wellbeing, agricultural production, and environmental sustainability. This paper explores the heterogeneity of food consumption patterns in an ecologically and culturally diverse country. Using a latent class approach (which creates clusters of individuals with homogeneous characteristics), we analyse a food questionnaire (from the National Health and Nutrition Survey) applied across Mexico. We identify four clusters of food consumption (staple, prudent, high meat and low fruit) and find that belonging to these clusters is determined by socioeconomic, demographic (age, sex) and geographic (region, urban/rural) characteristics. Maize and pulses tend to constitute a larger proportion of the diet of poor, rural populations living in the south, while urban populations eat more varied foods, including ingredients whose production systems tend to exert more pressure on natural resources (for instance, meat). Despite the importance given in the literature to the Mexican gastronomy and its diverse traditional regional diets, we find that only 6% of the population adopts a food consumption pattern resembling the traditional Mexican diet. Instead, most of the Mexican population has a food consumption pattern resembling a western diet, which is problematic in terms of public health and environmental sustainability.
人们所吃的食物会影响公共健康和人类福祉、农业生产和环境可持续性。本文探讨了在一个生态和文化多样化的国家中，食物消费模式的异质性。我们使用潜在类别方法（该方法创建具有同质特征的个体集群），分析了在墨西哥全国范围内进行的一项食物调查问卷（来自国家健康和营养调查）的数据。我们确定了四种食物消费模式（主食型、谨慎型、高肉型和低水果型），并发现属于这些模式的群体是由社会经济、人口统计学（年龄、性别）和地理因素（地区、城乡）决定的。玉米和豆类在南部贫穷、农村地区的人口中往往占更大比例，而城市人口则食用更多种类的食物，包括其生产系统对自然资源施加更大压力的成分（例如肉类）。尽管文献中强调了墨西哥美食及其多样化的传统地区饮食，但我们发现只有 6%的人口采用类似于传统墨西哥饮食的食物消费模式。相反，大多数墨西哥人口的食物消费模式类似于西方饮食，这在公共健康和环境可持续性方面存在问题。
