Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we will analyze the ways in which public health discourses on food risk extend moral values through individual responsibility for bodily health, their own and that of their children, based on people's eating practices.

Paper long abstract:

This work is part of an ongoing study on infant feeding, public policies and daily life of domestic groups users of primary health care centers of the Buenos Aires city. In this presentation, we intend to analyze the ways in which nutritional problems in childhood and, in particular, childhood obesity, are presented as a public health problem at a global and local level from primary and secondary sources.

Stunting (short stature) and low weight (for age) as well as obesity are considered as one of the main ways in which social inequality is expressed.

Obesity has been defined by the WHO as an epidemic, chronic, multi-causal disease, costly for the health system and societies, and preventable. However, the strategies designed and implemented from the various governmental levels have aimed exclusively at modifying individual behaviors of boys and girls and of their mothers, fathers and caregivers.

In response to the obesity epidemic, discourses on healthy eating have built food and nutritional risks that reorient ideas about what constitutes a good meal and eating well. Eating practices as well as physical activity are medicalized, individualized and classified as "good" or "bad", "healthy" or "risky".

Education and prevention programs based on individual approaches for the management of food and risk practices are questioned from different sectors and disciplines since they decontextualize and hold subjects responsible for their actions, neglecting the conditioning of health and nutrition.