Reflections on ideas and disputes in the context of the promotion of healthy eating.

Abstract

Actions in the promotion of healthy eating are strategic for reversing nutritional problems. This article analyzes the disputes over ideas in discursive repertoires on healthy eating in Brazil's national policies and international, government, civil society, and private commercial sector documents in the last 20 years. Based on the document analysis method in dialogue with the academic literature, the following perspectives on healthy eating were identified: traditional culturalist; medicalizing biological/nutritional; multidimensional; and systemic. The disputes are established between ideas in the following areas: the existence of "unhealthy foods"; the attributions, limits, and forms of State intervention; eating as an individual or public matter; and the meanings of sustainability, commensality, culture, and food. Policy positions on pesticides, food fortification, and supplementation are key elements in these disputes. In the policy sphere, the private commercial sector adopts strategies of fragmentation, downplaying, and distortion of meanings that reinforce polarization between individual actions (lifestyles, freedom of choice) and environmental interventions, thereby disseminating a narrow approach to food and nutrition education. Civil society pressures governments to establish concepts and principles in policies that directly affect the disputes' parameters. The latter act with greater or lesser permeability to pressures from internal or external stakeholders, depending on their composition and the institutional spaces for dialogue with society.