Logics of Eating in Alicante, Spain: Biosocial Relationships Connecting Migration, Food, Stress, and Health

Koselka, Elizabeth Palmer DeVine

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-nc5z-x717

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Logics of Eating in Alicante, Spain: Biosocial Relationships Connecting Migration, Food, Stress, and Health

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Although elevated stress and dietary change have each been associated with metabolic health decline for resettled populations in the Global North, considerably less attention is paid to the links between these two biosocial pathways. Addressing these linkages can elucidate interrelated diet and stress mechanisms that affect population health disparities over time, and works toward redressing food and health injustice for marginalized groups. This dissertation introduces the Migration, Stress, Food and Health Study (MCES: Estudio de la Migración, la Comida, el Estrés, y la Salud) to describe migration-related stress exposure, eating and diet change(s), and health among two generations of adults who emigrated from Latin America and resettled in Alicante, Spain. By working with Latin Americans who moved to this high-resource setting, MCES examines social logics that underlie ways of eating in Alicante through their comparative perspective. The project is also equipped to assess eating and stress reactivity that occurs after the major change of migrating to Spain. Using baseline survey data from 85 participants (38 in the parent cohort; 47 in the child cohort), analysis presented herein aimed to (1) understand social-economic factors that influence eating habits, migration-related stress exposure, and health; (2) determine relationships between these three variables of interest; and (3) test for intergenerational trends. Statistical analysis prioritized descriptive and correlational analyses, and additional hypothesis-driven tests used bivariate and multiple linear regression models. Participants in the sample mostly reported modest-to-low monthly incomes, and spanned a wide range of demographic, educational and occupational backgrounds. Having fewer material assets (e.g., experiencing month-to-month financial difficulty) negatively influenced eating, stress, and health across multiple measures, while more resources and social support correlated with better health and health-related measures, i.e., less change in eating habits, better diet quality, less migration-related stress. Those who reported less-severe migration-related stress had less change in eating habits, better diet quality, and better health status. Participants’ self-reported health status was strongly associated with their socio-economic conditions and their migration-related stress exposure, but not with diet change or diet quality. Experiencing food insecurity did show a strong negative influence on health in a pairwise correlation matrix; however, in a multivariate model, this relationship was less-robust than migration-related stress or experiencing financial difficulty, suggesting that socio-economic deprivation and discrimination have the strongest impact on health status. Finally, comparing responses between a subsample of matched parent-child pairs (n=64) showed that a parent’s outcome predicted their child’s across multiple measures of eating, migration-related stress exposure score, and self-reported health score. The findings from the MCES cohort suggest that a focus on diet habits and quality cannot adequately explain health inequity. Rather, the strongest leverage points for improving participants’ health and advancing health equity in Alicante are to improve social and economic support for Latin Americans living there.

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