Nutrition

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Nutrition

Human adaptation to the diverse geography of Latin America has produced many types of nutritional regimes. In Mesoamerica and the Andes, complex agricultural systems supported the growth of densely settled, culturally elaborate civilizations. In the less densely populated Caribbean islands, tropical lowlands, and plains, hunting and gathering in addition to agriculture provided the basis for the diet. European expansion in the sixteenth century altered these civilizations and their nutritional regimes. Interpretations of the nutritional impact of the Conquest and of colonization differ, partly because of varying interpretations of pre-Columbian diets. Some scholars emphasize extreme protein deficiencies, or at least serious undernutrition; others argue the prevalence of nutritionally complete diets, and suggest that pre-Columbian diets were both more balanced and of more nutritional value than those of today. Recent research offers significant evidence supporting the thesis of good diets in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the Andes, and in some areas of the tropical lowlands, but more research is needed before definitive claims can be made.

There is little doubt that diets changed beginning in 1492. The introduction of new plants and animals and the displacement of traditional ones initiated nutritional changes in Latin America, and subsequently in the rest of the world. For the first time in history, nutritional regimes incorporated foods from around the world. Latin America enjoyed these advantages first, followed by Europe, Africa, and Asia. Most significant from a nutritional standpoint were the new sources of protein, specifically the cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and fowl introduced by the Europeans. Then came the new sources of carbohydrates, the grains, fruits, and vegetables of the conquerors. Bananas and plantains emerged as especially important sources of carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. Through much of tropical Latin America, land planted in plantains and bananas produced twenty times as much food as the same land planted in grain.

The variety of foods available in Latin America created the potential for the best nutritional regimes in the world in the sixteenth century, though social and political forces that influenced the production, distribution, and consumption of nutrients could undermine the realization of that potential. The rapid decline of the Amerindian population, for example, lessened the pressure on food resources but restricted the number of workers available for food production. As the Indian population declined, new labor and tribute demands emerged. The Spanish and Portuguese regimes relied on the control of labor, Indian and black, for the building and maintenance of cities, mines, factories, and plantations.

Many accounts emphasize the exploitative aspects of colonialism as evidence of widespread malnutrition during the period. They also emphasize monopolistic practices, high prices, short weighing, and adulteration of foodstuffs as contributing to poor nutrition. To combat these practices, Spain and Portugal transferred many of their regulatory institutions and policies to Spanish America and Brazil. When enforced, laws requiring adequate supplies at fair prices did help to ensure a suitable diet. Access of the worker, free or slave, to small garden plots and to hunting and gathering was also an important factor in determining diet.

Population decline and disease are often linked to nutrition. For Latin America, poor nutrition is frequently offered as an explanation for disease and death. While the lack of research on the quantity and quality of early Latin American diets makes this relationship difficult to prove for most social and ethnic groups, the evidence for black slaves in the Caribbean and Brazil is convincing. Slaves suffered severe vitamin A and B complex deficiencies when their diets were limited to root crops and dried fish and meat. Despite adequate caloric intake, there were deficiencies of vitamins and minerals that led to the widespread incidence of beriberi, pellagra, yaws, and other diseases. Other evidence suggests that the poor—when they had control over their own diets—ate as well as or better than the rich. They relied more heavily on unrefined foods, fish, and fresh fruits and vegetables. And as anthropological research has shown, the diets of twentieth-century tropical peoples still adhering to traditional ways are nutritionally adequate. Complex biospheres provide rich and varied diets, including adequate sources of protein, often with less labor cost than in modern industrial societies. The emphasis on protein deficiency as an explanation for cultural practices such as cannibalism and warfare has been balanced by an emphasis on sufficient protein in indigenous diets.

Hunting and gathering declined as the cattle, pigs, and sheep introduced by Europeans became more important in the diet. Where abundant cattle continued to roam—the great range lands of the pampas, the São Francisco River basin, the llanos of Venezuela—there was surplus protein. Those areas with dense populations, especially the expanding urban centers in the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, and the Andes, experienced more difficulty in securing adequate supplies of protein and other nutrients by the end of the colonial period. Population growth, increasing production for export, deforestation and soil erosion, and the problems of supplying ever larger urban centers made securing an adequate diet more difficult. Adding to the difficulties were climatic problems (the recurring droughts of northeastern Brazil, for example) that limited food production.

By the late nineteenth century, Latin America was experiencing a nutritional transition, the time and intensity of which varied from region to region. While Europe entered a period of increased consumption of calories and protein, Latin America faced increased shortages. In the Andes and Middle America, in particular, hunger became more persistent. Reports of increased food prices, declines in production of subsistence foods, and monotonous, simple diets suggest a decline in nutrition over earlier years. Control over land and labor were the critical issues. As haciendas, plantations, and cities expanded and rural people became a part of increasingly complex production and labor arrangements, diets suffered. Increased commercial agriculture and rapid urbanization were the main trends undermining diets. This interpretation has merit, but the diversity of regions, resources, and labor arrangements makes generalizations about nineteenth-century diets difficult.

By the 1920s, nutritional deficiencies, along with alcohol abuse, illiteracy, and lack of adequate sanitary conditions, emerged as widely discussed social problems. Gradually, national and international organizations began to focus on the inadequacy of the Latin American diet. Studies began to reveal the extent of nutritional-deficiency diseases. The Tercera Conferencia Internacional de la Alimentación, held in Buenos Aires in 1939, concluded that "Latin America lived a true tragedy due to the malnutrition that affects all the countries." Fully 25 percent of the population could not afford recommended diets. The International Labor Office provided comparative information, demonstrating the weakness of the Latin American diet when compared with that of other regions in the hemisphere. In the 1930s, Chilean wage earners spent 71.1 percent of all expenditures on food, residents of Bogotá, 63.7 percent, of Mexico City, 56.4 percent, compared with 33.5 percent in the United States. The surveys, which seem to suggest poor nutrition, at times conflict with detailed analyses of the balanced diets of poor villages, where the staples of maize, tubers, beans, and chilies were only infrequently supplemented by eggs, milk, and meat. The advantage that these poor rural people had was that they followed the traditional custom of consuming wild foods—weeds, insects, grubs, and worms—that helped to balance the diet.

It is as difficult to generalize about diets in the twentieth century as it is regarding earlier periods. At the national level in the early 1960s, Argentines consumed 3,600 calories and 100 grams of protein per day, higher than residents of the United States, who consumed 3,220 calories and 97 grams of protein. No other Latin American country achieved the consumption levels of Argentina; most fell far below. Central American and Andean countries had particularly severe problems of malnutrition. Marasmus was not widespread, but there were increasing examples of protein-calorie malnutrition, and the deficiency diseases of beriberi, endemic goiter, xerophthalmia, and ariboflavinosis. Low birth weight and small stature were also signs of the extent of malnutrition in many regions. So were the incidence and severity of infectious and parasitic diseases.

Reports from the 1960s predicted a "Malthusian crisis" in Latin America if food production was not increased. Most regions have achieved the increase in production. In addition, national and international organizations have sponsored nutritional research, food distribution systems, and educational efforts. New foods (such as Incaparina, a nutritious soybean substitute for milk introduced by the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP) in the 1950s in Guatemala) have been developed to reduce malnutrition. This does not mean an improvement in nutrition. Indeed, in some regions, Central America and the Andes, for example, nutritional levels have declined, despite increased food production. Even traditionally food-wealthy countries such as Argentina have experienced severe food shortages in recent years.

Two problems undermining nutrition are the increasing production of foods for export and the increasing inequality in the distribution of income. Since the 1970s, soybean production has grown significantly, reaching nearly 100,000 metric tons (a jump from 12,927 metric tons in 1978), putting it ahead of cassava, wheat, rice, and banana production—traditional food crops in Latin America. The decreasing income of the poor aggravated by the global recession of the early 1970s, limited purchasing power for food. To these difficulties can be added a host of problems: displacement of traditional foods; increased reliance on processed, imported foods; control by transnational food corporations; marketing directed to middle- and upper-class incomes; food policies that subsidize urban and neglect rural populations; and counterproductive food-aid policies. Seldom are the traditional explanations of peasant ignorance and conservatism, lack of capital and technology, and climate and soil deficiencies used to explain nutrition today.

Demography also influences nutrition, though the extent of its influence is debated. Once rural societies have become overwhelmingly urban. The rapid population increase that began during the interwar years nearly tripling the region's inhabitants, increased pressure on food resources. Without political and social mechanisms to ensure the equitable distribution of food, hunger and nutritional deficiencies followed. In the twenty-first century, people in the Latin American region have seen improvements in overall health care and quality of life. Yet new problems related to an aging and urban society have also arisen. The effects of this can be seen with increases in conditions like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Still, malnutrition continues to be a challenge, particularly for poor urban and rural residents. Stunted growth, a consequence of inadequate nutrients, continues to be evident in children throughout the Andean region. Many impoverished children rely upon federal- and state-sponsored public school lunch programs for their basic nutritional needs. Indeed, most of the recent research on hunger in Latin America confirms the conclusions of the Conference on Food and Agriculture, a forerunner of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, held in the United States in 1943, which declared that "the primordial cause of hunger and poor nutrition is poverty."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernard R. Ortiz De Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health and Nutrition (1990), presents an excellent analysis of diets in central Mexico before the Conquest. For comparison with the Maya, see Luis Alberto Vargas, "La alimentación de los mayas antiguos," in Historia general de la medicina en México vol. 1, edited by Fernando Martínez Cortés (1984), pp. 273-282. Alfredo Castillero Calvo surveys early diets in "Niveles de vida y cambios de dieta a fines del período colonial en América," in Anuario de Estudios Americanos 44 (1987): 427-475. Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (1987) and Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, "Deficiency Diseases in the Caribbean," in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 2 (1980): 197-215, assess slave diets. John C. Super and Thomas C. Wright, eds., Food Politics, and Society in Latin America (1985) analyzes historical and current issues of food supply. The works by Jacques M. May and Donna L. McLellan, The Ecology of Malnutrition in Mexico and Central America (1972) and The Ecology of Malnutrition in Eastern South America (1974) are convenient summaries of information on nutrition. Still very much worthwhile reading is the early classic statement on nutrition in Latin America by Josué De Castro, The Geography of Hunger (1952). Charles D. Brockett incorporates recent theoretical and interdisciplinary work on food, nutrition, and social and economic change in Land, Power, and Poverty: Agrarian Transformation and Political Conflict in Central America (1988). For recent nutritional data consult the yearly Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports, The State of Food and Agriculture.

Additional Bibliography

Arcondo, Aníbal B. Historia de la alimentación en Argentina: Desde los orígenes hasta 1920. Buenos Aires: Ferreyra Editor, 2002.

Bartell, Ernest J., and Alejandro O'Donnell. The Child in Latin America: Health, Development, and Rights. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Globalization of Food Systems in Developing Countries: Impact on Food Security and Nutrition. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2004.

Sawaya, Ana Lydia, and Alexandre Archanjo Ferrari. Desnutrição urbana no Brasil em um período de transicão. São Paulo: Cortez Editora: Centro de Recuperação e Educação Nutricional: Núcleo Salus Paulista, 1997.

Lima, Eronides da Silva. Mal de fome e não de raça: Gênese, constituição e ação política da educação alimentar, Brasil 1934–1946. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2000.

Lima Junior, Jayme Benvenuto, Lena Zetterströ, and Flávio Luiz Schieck Valente. Extrema pobreza no Brasil: A situação do direito à alimentação e moradia adequada. São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 2002.

Long, Janet, and Luis Alberto Vargas. Food Culture in Mexico. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005.

Ochoa, Enrique. Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000.

Pollitt, Ernesto. Consecuencias de la desnutrición en el escolar peruano. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú: Fondo Editorial, 2002.

Prudencio B., Julio. Soberanía o inseguridad?: El problema alimentario en Bolivia. La Paz: Gisvol, 2005.

Remedi, Fernando Javier. Consumo de alimentos, condiciones sanitarias y políticas públicas en la Ciudad de Córdoba en las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Córdoba: EMCOR Editorial de la Municipalidad de Córdoba, 2003.

World Bank. Nutritional Failure in Ecuador: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007.

Wright, Lori E. Diet, Health, and Status among the Pasión Maya: A Reappraisal of the Collapse. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.

John C. Super

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture