Women and Nutrition

Proverbs concerning food and eating abound in our society. From “You are what you eat” to the well known adaptation “A Mars a Day.....!”. Eating is an important physiological event with significant health implications. We all need to consume a certain number of nutritional elements in our diet, thus the often quoted ‘balanced diet’. However, food and eating also have great social and cultural significance and factors such as gender and class have a crucial effect on who we are and what we eat. These factors, beyond the physiological, have the potential to tip the balance of the diet.