Food, Culture, and Obesity in a French Population

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University of Florida graduate student, Stacey A. Giroux, under the direction of Dr. H. Russell Bernard, will undertake sociocultural research on how changes in national dietary cultures are understood and acted upon at the level of the individual and household. There is abundant evidence that eating practices are changing worldwide, converging toward similar diets that are high in fat and sugar and low in fiber. Many nations also have escalating rates of overweight and obesity. This project will investigate the social and cultural foundations of this global phenomenon.The research will be carried out in Loire region of France, a place with strong cultural traditions in food. The researcher will collect data on how dietary changes are articulated and experienced by the French, and how the shifts in food practices and food cultures have affected their health. She will employ a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, including participant observation of her informants as they shop and prepare meals, along with unstructured and semi-structured interviewing. She will use cognitive anthropological data elicitation tasks to model cultural food themes, she will then evaluate for saliency and individual correspondence through cultural consensus and consonance analysis. Body Mass Index information and social network data will be collected, as well, to test potential relationships among personal network features and cultural models about healthy diets and the actual onset of obesity.The research is signficant in the contribution it will make to the scientific understanding of the sociocultural pathways of changing world diets and their effects of health. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.