Feature

Loaves and Fishes

Advertisements, and culturally insensitive nutritional education programmes, may be adding to woes about food in the Pacific, rather than alleviating them.

By Dr Nancy Pollock

In the Pacific, as in many other parts of the world, there is a major discrepancy between people's own views as to what makes a healthy diet, the nutritionists' messages, and the media messages. When the nutritionists and advertisers change their minds about what is nutritionally sound, it is doubly confusing for the consumer.

In pre-European times in the South Pacific, there was a healthy supply of food growing in the yards and fields. Nutritionists and, before them, missionaries, advised the people of the region that those foods were not good enough. So wheat flour, white potatoes and dried beef were imported from overseas. Later came canned foods, soft drinks and frozen goods such as ice cream. These were considered to be `civilised' foods, in contrast to the locally grown taro and kumara.

The new fashion in food necessitated imports from half-way around the world. These imports were costly, scarce and superfluous to local needs, but essential for the new settlers to meet their beliefs about what was proper food. To local people, the new foods did not satisfy in the way that their traditional foods did. The new fashion in food was `worn' only by those who could afford it and who wished to emulate the newcomers' way of life.

Nutritional Conflict

From this beginning, the conflict between western and local foods has become more extreme. Today in the Pacific, the catchword is modernisation, used to account for bad eating habits, such as overuse of salt, sugar and fats. The blame for eating fashionable foods has fallen on the people, not the system that introduced those foods.

We receive garbled messages from northern hemisphere sources and adulate them more because they are `scientific' than because they fit with the local environment. These include inappropriate scales such as the Harvard scale of weight for height. This scale is designed for a population living in a temperate climate and with a completely different activity pattern and lifestyle. By such scales, Pacific people are judged to be unhealthy and eating a poor diet.

What grounds do people use when they make decisions about the food that they eat? They use two types of information. One is the direct message given to us by our bodies and cultures -- "I feel like eating this." The other consists of a number of indirect messages, including those of the nutritionists. In the Pacific, there is a gap between what nutritionists are trying to do and the basis on which individuals make their food choices. The gap is so wide that nutrition education is making little or no difference to people's food choices.

Messages About Food

We receive many of our of our direct messages about good and bad food from the family environment. The caregiver directs the tastes of youngsters growing up and those sharing the food. Biological time clocks indicating hunger or a craving are not allowed free rein. Individual cravings for particular foods at particular times then may also be part of the direct message. These are also controlled culturally, whether by being labelled as bad for you, by cost or by restricted access, such as seasonality.

The direct messages address more than just good nutrition, they also address our satisfaction. Satisfaction comes from knowing that the foods you have eaten taste good, are socially appropriate, and are right for you at the time. For Fijians or Samoans, satisfaction entails having had one or more root vegetables, accompanied by food such as salt water fish, grated coconut or -- on a special occasion --  a piece of pork or turtle. If they have not had this, they may well say that they have not eaten in their sense of the term, even if they have just eaten a bun at the store. Direct messages about proper eating are governed by culture, not, as nutritionists seem to expect, by biology.

Another part of the direct message to the consumer is the association of health with what you eat. The slogan is you are what you eat. It seems that we are not allowed to make for ourselves the decision of what to eat. Nutritionists tell us that `they know what is best for us'. In effect they are telling us that our direct cultural messages are inadequate, or even wrong.

The nutritionists' education programme is counter to the direct message. They have designated three food groups as basic to any diet, even though these are not translatable into many dietary dialects. The nutritionist education programme is interventionist. It is designed to tell recipients what is good for them -- `you are not eating the right kinds of food, so you will get sick'.

Fortunately, there does seem to be an awareness that this negative approach should be stated in more positive terms. Examples of the positive approach include explaining which foods enhance other foods when eaten together, or explaining the meaning of complex terms such as cholesterol or polyunsaturated fat in layman's terms.

Nutrition education is also subject to change in fashions. In the 70s, nutritionists loudly bemoaned the number of snacks that were being consumed in the Pacific. Today, snacking is permissible -- as long as a wide variety of foods are eaten. Fibre has also become fashionable. Taro, yams and other local foods are now the `good guys', while the `baddies' are sipi (mutton flaps), corned beef and canned fruit in heavy syrup -- the fruits of modernisation.

Obesity Obsession

An example of where the conflict between the the direct message and the indirect message of the nutritionist has lead to confusion is the pessimistic concern over the body weight of Pacific islanders, particularly women. Obesity is a label applied all too frequently to Pacific Island people, especially Polynesian women.

"Why are we told that we are too heavy, when our mothers were heavy before us?" and "Our food is so important to us, it is hard to give it up and stop eating," are typical responses by Polynesian women to the claim that they are obese.

They have always been large and heavy. This is part of their heritage, not a disease of modernisation. Women from Wallis, for example, are heavy Polynesians. They show very few signs of the degenerative diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, that are supposed to be associated with heaviness. They wonder, therefore, why they are being told that they are at risk. This makes them shy about going to the hospital for a check up. They know they will be given a lecture about their weight.

These women are caught between the conflicting messages coming from their own direct source and indirect sources. Their society tells them it is normal to be large and heavy, and that it will make healthy babies. Doctors and nutritionists tell them that they are obese and should lose weight. This produces guilt feelings about food, but feelings which are not strong enough to make them want to eat less and lose weight.

Advertising Insidious

Indirect messages are insidious because they are frequently received often only semi-consciously. Advertising is a major source of these indirect messages. Advertisements appeal to the eye and ear, and carry messages that become familiar. We act on them without fully realising their impact.

Anyone who purchases food makes the decision based on what is available. If there are two or more brands of the same product, the decision must be made on price, previous knowledge of the product, current packaging or some enticement. The advertising of food is designed to catch as many consumers as possible. It is not designed to sell better health.

For example, the dairy industry is amongst the the most important of our primary producers. There has been great resistance to even the marketing of margarine -- not on nutritional grounds, but purely on commercial grounds. Another development in advertising has been to associate `natural' foods with good health. This has established consumer standards based on no clearly acceptable principles other than repetition and confusion.

So how do we decide what is healthy food? Should we be guided by the direct messages we receive from our culture and bodies, or by the indirect messages beamed at us from all sides, from the nutritionists, the advertisers and the glossy labels on the shelves. What information can be relied on?

The only clear answer is be warned. Nutritionists don't have all the answers. If their messages were consistent, it would not be such a problem. We could make an informed choice from the supermarket.

But nutrition fashions change. People suffer accordingly from the mass of conflicting direct and indirect messages. In the long run, self-monitoring may be the safest guide -- to thine own self be true.

Dr Nancy Pollock is a senior lecturer in anthropology at Victoria University.