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Dietary regimes and the nutrition transition: bridging disciplinary domains

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Abstract

The nutrition transition concept developed by Popkin has gained wide currency within the nutritional sciences literature as a way of understanding population wide changes to diet and energy balance and their related health outcomes in society. It offers a useful template of different nutritional patterns societies progress through, but it has not provided a comprehensive understanding of the why and how of dietary change. Building on insights from the literature on food regimes in the social sciences, this paper argues the concept of dietary regimes can augment the nutrition transition model and can serve as a bridge between social and health sciences around nutrition and dietary change. The political economy analysis of the dietary regime approach provides insights into the historical degradation of food and the diffusion of nutrient-poor products throughout food environments today. It also engages analysis of the key actors shaping food environments and diets in the industrial era. The dietary regime approach can provide fruitful directions with respect to concrete policy options to address the major issue of population wide weight gain that the nutrition transition model has sought to confront in recent iterations.

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Source Popkin (n.d.)

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Notes

  1. Demographic transition describes “the shift from a pattern of high fertility and high mortality to one of low fertility and low mortality (typical of modern industrialized countries)” (Popkin 1993, p. 138).

  2. Epidemiologic transition describes “the shift from a pattern of prevalent infectious diseases associated with malnutrition, periodic famine, and poor environmental sanitation to a pattern of prevalent chronic and degenerative diseases associated with urban-industrial lifestyles” (Popkin 1993, p. 138).

  3. Greater detail on each of these processes can be found in Winson (2013, Chs 6, 7, 8).

  4. For example, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia in the early part of the twentieth century some 130 varieties were reported to be grown on farms for on-farm use, to be sold in local markets or exported to Britain (Commissioner Public Works and Mines 1917).

  5. In the nutritional science literature terms such as “energy dense foods” and “nutrient poor foods” are counterposed to “nutrient rich foods”, but there does not seem to be universal agreement on the terms. Nutrient profiles of different food groups have been developed and utilized in an algorithm to identify, in a more quantifiable way, food groups according to their relative benefits for human health (for example, Drewnowski 2010). The challenge is to translate the metrics that have been developed into useful tools for consumers to identify the relative nutritional benefits of the actual edible processed products they confront in the marketplace.

  6. In the case of Kellogg’s, see Powell’s authoritative biography (Powell 1956). Pendergrast’s book (1993) on Coca-Cola is very useful in its coverage of the advertising effort put in by Candler in the early days of his company.

  7. For a discussion of the concept of differential profits within classical and Keynsian economics traditions, see Semmler (1984).

  8. For an examination of the significance of corporate concentration in the food sector in the Canadian context, see Winson (1993). For a current extensive analysis of concentration in the U.S. food industry see Howard (2016).

  9. For an early and particularly thoughtful analysis of the history, discourse and practices of alternative agriculture and food initiatives as a social movement in the United States see Allen (2004).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions and comments on our paper.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada

    Anthony Winson

  2. Department of Sociology, Sam Houston State University, Box 2446, Huntsville, TX, 77341, USA

    Jin Young Choi

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Winson, A., Choi, J.Y. Dietary regimes and the nutrition transition: bridging disciplinary domains. Agric Hum Values 34, 559–572 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9746-8

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