Alimentación y diabetes, un pequeño gran dilema: el caso de los tzotziles y tzeltales de los Altos de Chiapas

Abstract

Tzotzil and Tzeltal people with diabetes and their relatives were interviewed, contextual data gathered, and historical sources reviewed. The interviewees link the subject to causality, initial symptoms, diets, the resistance to diet change, they tell about their differences with medical views, their re-signification of type 2 mellitus diabetes and its emergence as a health problem in relation to local historic events. Interaction between global and sociocultural processes is also observed. Nourishment is a crucial aspect in diabetes that must be understood as a multidimensional experience, which demands the opening and deepening of medial perspectives and being able to negotiate holding an humanistic stance to deal with the prescription of patients diets.