Eating well with Canada's food guide? Authoritative knowledge about food and health among newcomer mothers.
OBJECTIVE
Current versions of Canada's Food Guide (CFG) aim to inform a culturally diverse population, but it is not known how intended audiences from different cultural and linguistic groups within Canada's diverse population understand and apply its messages.


METHODS
We analyzed data from qualitative interviews conducted with 32 newcomer mothers of children aged 1-5 years to explore how conceptions of food and health change with migration to Canada among Spanish-speaking Latin American and Tamil Speaking Sri Lankan newcomers and may influence the appropriateness and applicability of Canada's Food Guide (CFG) as a nutrition education tool. We applied Jordan's model of authoritative knowledge to identify different forms of newcomer maternal nutrition knowledge, how they influence child feeding practices, and shifts causing some forms of knowledge to be devalued in favor of others.


RESULTS
Awareness of CFG differed between groups, with all Latin American and only half of Tamil participants familiar with it. Three distinct, overlapping ways of knowing about the relationship between food and health are identified within both groups of mothers: "natural" foods as healthy; influence of foods on illness susceptibility, and the nutritional components of food. CFG was found to be limited in its representations of recommended foods and its exclusive utilization of biomedical concepts of nutrition.


CONCLUSIONS
Development of new, culturally competent versions of CFG that depict a variety of ethno-culturally meaningful diets and encompass both non-biomedical conceptualizations of food and health has the potential to enhance effective knowledge translation of CFG's key messages to an increasingly cosmopolitan Canadian population.
Department of Community Health Sciences, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, 3280 Hospital Drive NW, Calgary, AB T2N 4Z6, Canada. Electronic address: andersol@ucalgary.ca.
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Anderson
Department of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.
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Mah
Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada.
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Sellen
D000328:Adult; D002170:Canada; D002675:Child, Preschool; D054521:Cultural Competency; D003469:Culture; D004032:Diet; D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D005260:Female; D006262:Health; D006266:Health Education; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008875:Middle Aged; D009035:Mothers; D018673:Nutrition Policy; D009753:Nutritive Value; D016487:Parenting; D036301:Qualitative Research; D013020:South America / Q000208:ethnology; D013188:Sri Lanka / Q000208:ethnology; D055815:Young Adult
Authoritative knowledge; Canada's Food Guide; Children's nutrition; Immigrants; Refugees