Ecology of Food and Nutrition (EFN) promotes scholarly debate and engagement on the holistic and cross-cultural dimensions of the study of food and nutrition. It emphasizes foods and food systems not only in terms of tXheir utilization to satisfy human nutritional needs and health, but also to promote and contest social and cultural identity. Articles published in this issue of EFN examine the complex relationship among dietary habits, socio-demographic characteristics, personal well-being, and health. One of the articles by Ruel-Bergeron et al. presents the results of a qualitative evaluation of a government-sponsored stunting prevention program in Malawi. This article exemplifies the role of qualitative methods in program evaluation by focusing on people’s lived experiences and opinions from an emic (or insider) perspective.
The article by Nezlek and colleagues examines the relationship between vegetarian dietary habits and personal well-being. Focusing on standardized measures of eating habits and self-esteem (broadly defined) among 403 undergraduate university students, the researchers suggest that, regardless of gender, the daily lives of vegetarians were less positive in terms of self-esteem and psychological adjustment and more negative in terms of mood as compared to those of semi-vegetarians and omnivores. It is unclear, however, if the vegetarians’ negative daily experiences reflect the behavior of others toward them or their perceptions of others’ behaviors or both.
In their article, Gbogouri et al. describe dietary habits, nutritional status, and the socio-demographic characteristics of students in Cote d’Ivoire. The researchers collected anthropometric measurements (height and weight), demographic and health data, and food consumption patterns among 156 students (87 males 73 females). The results suggest that there is a noticeable proportion (from 6% to 7.5%) of students with a medical history of chronic diseases including diabetes and high blood pressure. Women students were more predisposed to high blood pressure than men students. Although most of the students reported exercising regularly, irregular food intake, lack of breakfast, consumption of high carbohydrates rich diet for three main meals of the day may be responsible for negative health outcomes.
Finally, the article by Ruel-Bergeron and colleagues reports the results of a qualitative study to identify physical and sociocultural facilitators and barriers to access to and utilization of a nutrition program in rural Malawi. In 2013, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Government of Malawi, World Food Program, and the World Vision Malawi jointly launched the Malawi Stunting Prevention program to demonstrate a stunting reduction model using a lipid-based nutrient supplement for children under 2 years old in the Ntichisi district of Malawi. The program focused on reducing stunting by up to 10 percent among 6–23-month-old children with low-dietary diversity. In addition to offering a lipid-based nutrition product, the program offered counselling and an integrated package of high-impact interventions to children and mothers.
Based on their in-depth study in the Central region of Malawi to evaluate the impact of a stunting prevention program implemented by the Government of Malawi, the authors report that there is high acceptability of the program in the target community. Specifically, considering that participation in the program requires community members to travel monthly to a distribution point, high participation rate can be considered an excellent achievement of the program implementors. The study also suggests that program messages are reaching out to mothers, caretakers, and community members. However, it was challenging for the program implementors to effectively promote healthy eating messages (e.g. six food groups) to target mothers. The authors recommend that this important national program can be strengthened by building the capacity of program volunteers to deliver individualized and situation- and age-specific infant and young child feeding and hygiene messaging as well as using local (or emic) categories to describe foods.