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Symposium: Beliefs, Power and the State of Nutrition: Integrating Social Science Perspectives...

Interrelationships between Power-Related and Belief-Related Factors Determine Nutrition in Populations¹

Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY and ^* Joint Program in Urban Systems, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, NJ

²To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gp32{at}cornell.edu.

The vast majority of social research in nutrition has focused either on economic, material and political factors ("power-related" variables) or on psychological, cultural and attitudinal factors ("belief-related" variables). Even when data on both classes of factors are collected, the orientation in analysis is to treat one of the two classes as "confounding" or "control" variables. Although single-focus studies have yielded essential knowledge about the role of specific factors, they fail to reveal the mechanisms through which belief-related and power-related variables interact to produce nutritional outcomes. Data from the Nutrition CRSP project in Mexico are used to illustrate the interactions between household economic conditions and maternal education on household diet. As has been seen in other developing country contexts, women in more favorable economic circumstances, and who have more education, tend to feed their children a higher quality diet. However, even in better-off households dietary quality is not uniformly high, a finding that reflects the operation of other values and cultural factors that direct resource allocation to other sectors of family activity.

KEY WORDS: • social determinants of nutrition • scientific knowledge and nutrition inventions • maternal education • Mexico

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