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Globalization, Diet and Child Health in Three Latin American Indigenous Populations

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Human Growth and Nutrition in Latin American and Caribbean Countries

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Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to the nutrition transition and its effects on diet, growth, and health of very rural Latin American indigenous infants and children. Case studies are drawn from fieldwork in communities of Tsimane forager-farmers in the Bolivian Amazon, Venezuelan Pumé hunter-gatherers, and Yucatec Maya subsistence farmers in Mexico. The chapter will illustrate how globalization, modernization, and the nutrition transition can occur in a prolonged and piecemeal fashion, with unpredictable effects on infants and children in culturally and geographically isolated populations. In the Bolivian Amazon, for example, modernization was associated with improved breastfeeding outcomes according to international recommendations; and infant growth was inversely associated with observed breastfeeding frequency. In Venezuelan savannah hunter-gathers with very high infant mortality, few differences were observed in infant and child feeding practices from 1992 to 2007 despite some exposure to modernizing influences, and anthropometric indices were associated with thymic size, a proxy for immunological functioning. In Yucatec Maya subsistence farmers, I describe broad changes in mother-infant diets over a 60-year period, noting particularly the ways that the nutrition transition affects contemporary Maya farmers. To illustrate its direct and indirect effects on children’s growth, as well as the persistence of traditional practices, I summarize results from a well-studied cohort of Maya children with an extremely prolonged median breastfeeding duration. Together, these studies illustrate the unpredictable nature of the nutrition transition in culturally and geographically distinct populations, the resilience of indigenous traditions, and the many ways that infant-child growth and health are shaped by early-life conditions in complex and changing environments.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Amanda Veile

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  1. Department of Human Ecology, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (Cinvestav-IPN), Unidad Mérida, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico

    Sudip Datta Banik

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Veile, A. (2023). Globalization, Diet and Child Health in Three Latin American Indigenous Populations. In: Datta Banik, S. (eds) Human Growth and Nutrition in Latin American and Caribbean Countries. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27848-8_3

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