Why Eating Healthy Looks Different For Everyone: Lauren Senior (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Lauren Senior’s talk titled “Why Eating Healthy Looks Different For Everyone” at TEDxLeedsBeckettUniversity conference.

Lauren Senior’s talk, “Why Eating Healthy Looks Different For Everyone,” explores the concept of dietary acculturation, particularly among African and Caribbean immigrants in the UK. She discusses how migration leads to changes in traditional diets, often influenced by the availability and cost of native foods in a new country.

Senior emphasizes the impact of globalization on eating habits, leading to an increase in high-fat, high-sugar, and high-salt diets, which affects the health of immigrants. She critiques the UK’s Eat Well Guide for not adequately representing traditional foods from diverse cultures. Ultimately, Senior calls for more culturally inclusive public health strategies that acknowledge the varying definitions of a healthy diet across different cultures.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Food is an integral part of everyone’s culture. Everybody eats. When you leave home to go to another country or to go to university, you think about your favorite food and who you ate with. Since eating is more than just nourishing your body.

When I think about my favorite food, I think about the sleepy town of Port Royal, Jamaica, a restaurant called Glorious. My order is fried fish and festival. The wait time might be long, but it’s worth it. The crispy skin of the fish, the tender flesh melts in my mouth.

Festival, nice and crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, is a perfect side to go with the fried fish. It’s absolutely delicious. Now think about your favorite food and imagine that you could no longer have it as often because of a cost or accessibility. How would you feel about that?

Migration and Dietary Changes

This happens when persons migrate to another country. They may no longer have a traditional diet as often because of migration. People migrate for a number of reasons. For career opportunities, education, and leaving war-torn countries.

When this happens, traditional diets may not be had as often as before. So how does migration affect your dietary habits? The researcher, Sassy Abbot, says that dietary acculturation is when migrants adopt the eating habits and food choices of the host country. It doesn’t happen overnight, but the complex factors impact dietary acculturation.

Socio-economic, demographic, and cultural factors. So imagine you’ve left an African or Caribbean country to come to the UK. Back home, you could get your traditional diets and your foods quite easily. The supermarkets, the markets, friends, family, and restaurants.

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Challenges in Maintaining Traditional Diets

You had no issues with accessing your traditional foods. But now you’ve moved to Leeds. The largest markets don’t have the traditional foods, or if they do, it’s quite costly. You might work different shift patterns.

You might not have time to go to the markets. You might not live close to African or Asian supermarkets. So there are challenges in obtaining a traditional diet. This is dietary acculturation.

So let’s look at Ghanaian migrants and Nigerian migrants in the UK. They’re the largest number of West African migrants in the UK. Their diets are typically composite dishes, which means it’s foods from different food groups, and it’s normally one pot meals. For example, soups and stews.

African and Caribbean Diets in the UK

Vegetables like onions, peppers, tomatoes are the key ingredients for these soups and stews. Roots and tubers like yam, sweet potato, coca yam are a side to these soups and stews. They’re boiled, pounded, and form into a dough, pounded yam, normally eaten alongside these soups and stews. For the Caribbean population, the diets might be different across different islands, but typically the meats, poultry, and seafood are seasoned with herbs and spices that either curried, stewed, jerked, or baked.

Vegetables and fruits are normally blended into juices, and pulses are added to meals, such as rice and peas. This is the traditional diet of Caribbean and African migrants in the UK. But our world is changing and becoming increasingly globalized. The Western diet of high fat, high sugar, high salt, limited physical activity, is evidence outside of the UK.

Popkin theorized that the nutrition transition occurs when dietary habits change with economic growth. This is characterized by eating frequently away from the house, having lower fiber foods, energy-dense foods, and fruits and vegetables less often. So then how does this Western lifestyle affect the health and nutrition status of African and Caribbean populations in the UK?

Dietary Changes and Health Impacts

The researchers Osei Kwasi conduct a study to look at how dietary acculturation impacted dietary habits. Amongst Ghanaian migrants in the UK, in comparison to Ghanaians back at home in Ghana, traditional staples like yam, plantain, were still important as part of their dietary lifestyle. But in comparison to the Ghanaians back at home, breads and cereals were eaten in higher consumption in comparison to Ghanaian migrants in Europe. Fruits were also eaten more often by the Ghanaians in Ghana.

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Sweets, breads, pastries were eaten more often by the Ghanaian migrants across Europe. And similarly, the Caribbean population who has been in the UK longer than the West African population, their diets have become more affected due to dietary acculturation. Sugar-sweetened beverages, pastries, cakes were eaten more often by the Caribbean population in comparison to the West African population in the UK. This research was conducted by Goff and others, where they found that Caribbean migrants, their diets had become more westernized in comparison to West African migrants. So then how does this affect the health status?

This westernized lifestyle is detrimental to the health and nutrition status of Caribbean and West African migrants in the UK. Heart disease is lower amongst persons of African and Caribbean heritage. However, stroke type 2 diabetes is higher amongst Caribbean and African populations in the UK. High sugar diets can lead to increased weight gain.

Dietary fats, especially saturated fats, can increase the risk of heart disease. But African and Caribbean populations have lower cholesterol levels in comparison to white European groups.

If we know this, the public health messaging should promote the positives of traditional diets, especially if they are lower in cholesterol. The low cholesterol levels are also evidenced in the Caribbean and across African countries.

The UK’s Eat Well Guide and Traditional Diets

For too long, the public health messaging as to what constitutes a healthy diet did not include traditional foods. This is the UK’s Eat Well Guide. It’s a guide of what you should have across your day and the different food groups and what foods you should limit. From the Eat Well Guide, do you think anything’s missing?

Well, I can tell you lots of things are missing. If you look at the African and Caribbean Eat Well Guide, you can see that traditional foods are present in the Eat Well Guide. There’s plantain, sweet potato, breadfruit, ackee, etc. Similarly, the South Asian Eat Well Guide also shows traditional diets can form a part of a healthy lifestyle.

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So, is there any current research that can tell us what the current dietary habits are of African and Caribbean populations in the UK? The National Nutrition and Diet Survey happens in the UK every year. The sample size is not large, but even smaller still for persons of African and Caribbean backgrounds. Therefore, the current dietary habits of these populations is not currently known.

Research on Migrant Diets and Nutrition

So, what research exists investigating the diet and nutrition of these migrants? So, there’s three studies that I have here in the last couple years, all looking at the dietary habits, health status, and nutrition-related health of African, Caribbean, and South Asian populations. The three things, or the things that these three articles have in common, is that it’s culturally specific. What that means is that the intervention is either led by someone of the same ethnicity, the language might be the same, the food that they promote as healthy are the traditional foods of African or Caribbean and South Asian communities.

The research is also led by the community. They work together with the researchers, so they can get an intervention that’s suitable for them. It’s culturally specific. People can relate to it. They feel included because they can see their food as part of a healthy diet. The Health Survey for England also happens yearly. It looks at lifestyle factors, physical activity levels, as well as eating habits. But in 2004, that was the last time that they did extra recruitment to have persons of Bangladeshi, Chinese, Pakistani, African, and Caribbean populations.

Since then, it hasn’t happened. Culturally specific nutrition programs for African and Caribbean populations is a priority. Thank you.