In Guatemala, nutritional problems are directly related to the difficulty to purchase food fit for human consumption due to low family incomes as well as low nutritional education. This situation motivated the realization of the present study whose main objective was to apply the dietary guidelines for Guatemala in three rural communities of Chiquimula. All three communities were previously aided by Benson Institute efforts to promote changes in eating behavior. The sample was comprised of mothers from the El Pinalito, El Guayabo, and Maraxco communities of the department of Chiquimula. There were eight mothers, four literate and four illiterate, from each community. The study was conducted in three phases. In the first, the access to, availability of, and consumption of food were determined through individual interviews with the mothers being studied. Phase two consisted of determining family diet characteristics through an initial interview with the mothers studied. These data, along with those from the first phase, served to identify foods to include in the graph of dietary guidelines (graph of the family food pot) of each community. This phase also included the development of a training plan on the Dietary Guidelines, which was aimed at the mothers being studied. In the third phase, a training plan was developed taking the data from phase two into account. Seven days after the training, a behavioral test was conducted to determine the feasibility of implementing the seven recommendations of the dietary guidelines. This was done through a final interview with the mothers in the study. The results indicate that families in these communities have a daily consumption of soft drinks and candy that negatively influences their quality of food intake and nutrition. In addition, it was found that the typical food for these families are ticucos (bean tamales), a food resource available to this population. However, the graph of the family pot from each community reflects a monotonous diet which agrees with results from other studies. From the behavioral test results obtained, it was apparent that two to three mothers from each of the three communities had problems following the second recommendation regarding the consumption of vegetables and herbs. Five mothers from both the El Guayabo and Maraxco communities also had problems following the third recommendation which was about fruit consumption. Lastly, one mother from Maraxco could not follow recommendations five or six regarding consumption of milk and consumption of meat, respectively. The inability to follow the second recommendation may be due to the fact that not all members of a family may like herbs and vegetables. Furthermore, the other recommendations that weren’t able to be followed may be due to the fact that the items are not easily accessible due to high prices, low family incomes, low local production, and poor seasonality. At the end of the study, the number of samples from the El Pinalito and El Guayabo villages decreased, affecting the comparison between the three communities. However, the community that adopted the majority of eating behaviors in relation to the dietary guidelines for Guatemala was El Pinalito, followed by El Guayabo, and lastly Maraxco. It was also found that it was more difficult for those with lower education to adopt good eating habits due to their inability to understand the importance of doing so. The same thing happened with the older mothers being studied which may be due to the fact that they have a harder time making changes. It was most difficult for the older illiterate mothers to adopt the changes in eating behavior, compared to the younger literate mothers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BGMYU2/oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-6433 |
| Date | 01 January 2000 |
| Creators | Salazar Donis, Sandra Liseth |
| Publisher | BYU ScholarsArchive |
| Source Sets | Brigham Young University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Coverage | Chiquimula (Guatemala) |
| Rights | http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/ |
Page generated in 0.0026 seconds