h culture of the Mexican-American community that is of basic importance.
A follow-up study by Alexander, Sherman, and Clark (1991) focuses more closely than the earlier study on the health risk factors associated with maternal acceptance, preference, and indeed encouragement of infancy and childhood obesity ("chubbiness") as an index of good childhood health. Demographic variables of mothers and children in the target Mexican-American community were a part of that study, and the most striking finding was that the obesity level of the mothers was an index of child obesity. A positive correlation was reported by Blank and Alexander (1988) between lower socioeconomic demographics and patterns of obesity in children of such households. Blank and Alexander also found that an environment that is consistent with lower socioeconomic households, as for instance in the case of households in which, owing to single-parent or dual-income situations children experience more than one Primary caregiver in the family, is also consistent with obesity in children.
Nutrition/Metabolism. The principal factor militating against sound nutritional habits, particularly for younger children, in the Mexican-American community appears to be grounded in demographics, which is to say money and education (Alexander, Sherman, and Clark, 1991). Feeding practices and cultural values are intimately related, and the implication of the study is that a positive abundance of one is felt to be a positive abundance of the other. But to a significant degree, the literature suggests, culture and practice are, in the real world, inflected by income and knowledge. There is something of a scale at work inasmuch as the lower the education of a subject study group, the higher the assertion of what might be referred to as traditional cultural values. At any rate, expression appears to be the overriding attitude of the lower socioeconomic sectors of the community.
T...