Background

The Hildegard Grunow Foundation supports investigations regarding nutritional habits, water consumption and calory intake in third world countries. Objective of these studies is to gather basic information for a future improvement of the diet. In this context diverse key aspects have emerged.

One focus is the question, to what extent particular diets are in accordance with the recommendations of the World Cancer Research Fund and of the American Institute for Cancer.  For this purpose we assessed the fraction of vegetarian food consumed for lunch and dinner by use of a self-developed pictorial register for normative enquiries in school children. This permitted to test the concordance of diets with individual guidelines components in different socioeconomic strata.

Results

When results were compared to corresponding data from Mexico, Scotland and Holland, it may not come as a surprise that the level of concordance was inversely correlated to the economic situation in the different countries and economic strata. Thus, e.g. vegetarian food components were most frequent in the poorest strata and more frequent in Guatemala > Mexico > Scotland > Holland, which, on a group level, showing the highest concordance with cancer prevention goals. This approach looks for “positive deviance”, i.e. for examples of a fare which is actually consumed in a population and can, thus, serve as an example for a feasible dietary pattern for cancer prevention.

Corresponding publications

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