Introduction

The study of Indigenous Peoples' diets and food systems is gaining attention in the context of global discourses around food sovereignty and cultural identity (Charlton 2016; Coté 2016; Kuhnlein et al. 2009; Nolan and Pieroni 2014). Works on Indigenous Peoples' food systems have provided a detailed understanding of the diversity and complexity of Indigenous diets (e.g., D'Ambrosio and Puri 2016; Knezevic et al. 2017; Zycherman 2015) and of the critical role local diets play in supporting Indigenous health (Kuhnlein 2014; Kuhnlein and Receveur 2007; Nesbitt and Moore 2016). But, while general information regarding Indigenous Peoples' diets is becoming increasingly available, the particularities and specificities of Indigenous children's diets remain largely unexplored (Dufour et al. 2016). Indeed, our knowledge of Indigenous children's diets mostly comes from works that focus 1) on adults' diets and present children's data as complementary (e.g., Kuhnlein and Receveur 2007; Roche et al. 2008, but see Chege et al. 2015 for an exception) or 2) on the health effects of diets among children (e.g., Egeland et al. 2010; El Hayek et al. 2010; Huet et al. 2012) and infants (e.g., Chege et al. 2015; Coimbra et al. 2013; Ickowitz et al. 2014; Keatinge et al. 2011).

Here we focus on Indigenous children's diets. Specifically, we use data collected among three Indigenous societies to examine questions that arise when considering the implication of three previous research findings on children's diets. First, recent research suggests that access to diverse landscapes shapes dietary quality because foods from the forest are important sources of energy and allow diet diversification (Peñafiel et al. 2011; Powell et al. 2013). As children from Indigenous societies typically live in close relationship with the environment but relate to itthrough daily activities that differ from adults' activities (Ruiz-Mallen et al. 2013; Gallois et al. 2015; Boyette 2010), the question is posed as to whether such difference is reflected in adults' and children's dietary patterns.

Second, research has extensively documented how Indigenous children's daily life varies according to their sex, age, and school attendance (Gallois et al. 2015; Lancy 2008; Ruiz-Mallen et al. 2013). Indigenous children are often involved in productive activities, such as foraging and agriculture, but involvement varies between boys and girls and among children of different group ages. For example, hunting is a main activity among Baka boys (from five to 1 6 years old), but Baka girls are more involved in household maintenance, fishing, and gathering activities. Similarly, Baka adolescents are more involved in income generating activities (i.e., agricultural wage labor or commercial hunting and gathering) than younger kids (Gallois et al. 2015). Is this variation in children's activities reflected in children's diets? Does the incorporation of new activities (i.e., schooling) affect children's diets? To date, no research has addressed this topic.

Finally, because of diet's long-term health effects, much research on Indigenous People's diets has focused on nutritional transitions (e.g., Kuhnlein et al. 2004; Port Lourenco et al. 2008; Valery et al. 2012). Nutritional transitions bring profound changes to the dietary choices of Indigenous Peoples, not only through the reduction in consumption of locallyproduced foods, but also through the incorporation of highly processed products (Galvin et al. 2015; lannotti and Lesorogol 2014). As most of this research has been conducted among adults, we lack a clear understanding of whether changes in dietary choices are also evident in the diets of Indigenous children.

Therefore, this article has three goals. Our first goal is to describe the dietary quality of children in three Indigenous societies as compared to adults in the same society. Our second goal is to assess differences in the composition of children's diets specifically looking at dietary differences 1) between boys and girls, 2) amongst children of different ages, and 3) between children who attend school and those who do not. Finally, our last goal is to examine food sources (i.e., wild, crops, and market) in children's diets and across food groups.

Methods

We conducted 18 months of fieldwork (from May 2012 to October 2013). Six researchers collected data in two communities in each of the three societies. Each researcher teamed up with local research assistants who helped in data collection and translations. We used a mixed method approach, combining both qualitative (i.e., participant observation and semi-structured interviews) and quantitative data collection methods (i.e., 24-hour dietary recalls and a census; see Reyes-García et al. [2016] for a full methodological description). All the protocols were pilot-tested in neighboring villages. This research adheres to the Code of Ethics of the International Society of Ethnobiology (ISE 2006) and has received the approval of the Ethics Committee of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (CEEAH-04102010). We obtained Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC; sensu FAO 2016) from each village and individual participating in this study, as well as agreement from the relevant political organization representing the Indigenous groups where we worked. As we interviewed children, we also followed the Code of Ethical Research Practice of the Centre for Children and Young People (CCYP 2005), which provides specific guidance on the standard ethical procedures to conduct research with children in international contexts. This included obtaining both parental and child consent and explaining to children their right to withdraw from the research at any point.

Results

We present the composition of children's diets in Table 1 (see also Supplemental Table 1 for more detail on dietary composition). The dietary diversity score of Tsimane' children was about 2 points higher than that of Baka and Punan Tubu children (6.4, 4.5, and 4.7, respectively). Moreover, while 100% of Tsimane' children's diets contained at least one fruit or vegetable, this was only the case for 78.9% and 85.7% of Baka and Punan Tubu children's diets, respectively. Similarly, while 86.7% of Tsimane' children's diets contained at least one animal source food, this was only the case for 51.3% and 57.9% of Baka and Punan Tubu children's diets, the difference lying in the high levels of fish consumption amongst the Tsimane'.

The composition of children's diet resembled the composition of diets of adults in the same group, with some remarkable differences (Table 1). Thus, Tsimane' children consumed more fruits and eggs, but less flesh meat than Tsimane' adults. Baka children consumed more tubers, green leafy vegetables, other fruits, organ and flesh meat, legumes, sweets, and spices than Baka adults, who in turn consumed more vitamin-A rich fruits than children. Finally, Punan Tubu children consumed more vitamin-A rich fruits and fish, but fewer vegetables than Punan Tubu adults (Table 1). Overall, in the three groups, dietary diversity was higher amongst children than amongst adults, although the difference was not statistically significant for the Tsimane'. Similarly, the percentage of diets including fruits and vegetables was higher amongst children than amongst adults, whereas the percentage of children's diets including animal source foods was only higher than the percentage of adult's diets including animal source foods amongst the Baka (51.3% vs 38.0%).

Amongst our participants, the composition of boys' diets resembled the composition of girls' diets for Baka and Punan Tubu children, but the percentage of diets including items from all food groups was lower among Tsimane' girls than among Tsimane' boys (Table 2). Tsimane' girls also had a lower dietary diversity score and animal derived food consumption score than Tsimane' boys. Punan Tubu boys' diets also included more often green leafy vegetables than girl's diets, a difference that was also reflected in the score of overall fruits and vegetables consumption.

Table 1.

Percentage of adults and children's diets including food items in the selected foods groups, by society.

Overall, we did not find differences in the food groups included in the diets of children in different age categories (Table 3). The only statistically significant difference found relates to Tsimane' children's consumption of white roots and tuber consumption, a food group whose consumption increased with age. However, this trend seems to be an exception.

We also compared the diet composition for children attending and not attending school (Table 4). Amongst the Tsimane', children not attending school consumed fewer white roots and tubers, other vegetables, and oils and fats than children attending school. They also had a lower dietary diversity score and a lower overall consumption of animal derived foods than children attending school. In the case of the Punan Tubu, children not attending school consumed fewer white roots, tubers, and fish, but more items in the category of “other vegetables” than children attending school. As with Tsimane' children, Punan Tubu children not attending school presented an overall lower dietary diversity score and a lower overall consumption of animal derived foods than their peers attending school. We did not find any difference in the dietary composition of Baka children attending and not attending school.

Table 2.

Percentage of boys' and girls' diets including food items in the selected foods groups and categories, by society.

Sources of food in children's diets varied from one society to another (Table 5). Tsimane' obtained from their agricultural plots food items in the categories of cereals, vitamin-A rich tubers and vegetables, whiter roots and tubers, vitamin-A rich fruits, eggs, and legumes. Food items in the categories of other fruits came from plots as well as from the wild. Tsimane' largely obtained organ meat, flesh meat, and fish from the wild. The market was the main source of other vegetables, milk products, oils and fats, sweets, and spices and beverages. The Baka obtained most vitamin-A rich fruits, other fruits, and oils and fats from agricultural plots. White roots and tubers and other vegetables were equally obtained from agricultural plots and the market, probably reflecting exchanges with Bantu neighbors. The forest was the main source of green leafy vegetables, organ and flesh meat, fish, and legumes and nuts. Finally, Baka children obtained most cereals, sweets, and spices and beverages in the market. Punan Tubu children obtained most cereals (mostly rice), white roots and tubers, green leafy and other vegetables, and fruits from their agricultural plots, although some fruits and vegetables were also collected from the wild. As with Tsimane' and Baka children, Punan Tubu children obtained most organ and flesh meat and fish from the wild. The market was the main source of legumes, milk products, oils and fats, sweets, and spices and beverages for the Punan Tubu.

Table 3.

Percentage of children's diets including food items in the selected foods groups and categories, by age category and society.

Table 4.

Percentage of children's diets including food items in the selected foods groups and categories for children attending and not attending school, by society.

Discussion

We derive four main findings from the work presented here. First, the diversity of Indigenous children's diets varies from one society to another, but it is generally high when compared to the dietary diversity scores reported in previous works. We acknowledge that such differences could be alternatively explained by cultural (i.e., different food systems), environmental (i.e., different food sources), or genetic differences (i.e., lactose intolerance in some of the groups; see Gerbault et al. 2009), as well as by a combination of these factors. However, establishing the potential role of each of these factors in shaping children's diets lies beyond the scope of this paper. We highlight, however, the higher dietary diversity found in comparison with other groups. For example, using a similar method with a representative sample of children from different ethnic groups in South Africa, Steyn et al. (2006) found a mean dietary diversity score of 3.6, one point lower than the score found for Baka children (4.5), the group with the lowest score in our sample. Furthermore, in the Steyn et al. (2006) study, the items with the highest frequency of consumption were within the cereal and roots and tuber groups; in contrast, the other vegetables, vitamin-A rich and other fruit group were consumed by less than one third of the children. The levels of fruit and vegetable intake found are also higher than those reported in studies on Indigenous children's diets elsewhere (e.g., Novotny et al. 2012; Valery et al. 2012). While methodological differences could explain at least some of the variation, we argue that a plausible explanation for the high dietary diversity in our sample relates to the fact that children participating in this study live in close relationship with their environment. Recent research suggests that access to diverse landscapes shapes dietary diversity (Peñafiel et al. 2011 ; Powell et al. 2013), for which Indigenous children's contact with the natural environment might indeed be a pathway for achieving high diversity in diet.

Table 5.

Sources of food in children's diets, by society.

The second important finding of our work is that Indigenous children's diets were more diverse than adult's diets. We can think of four non-mutually exclusive reasons to explain this difference. First, it is possible that adults recognize childhood as a vulnerable life stage requiring high food inputs to promote growth and maintain health, and thus derive certain foods to children. For instance, we observed that Baka adults regularly reserve meat for the children, even when they sell most of the animal hunted. Similarly, the Punan Tubu would feed to children fruit harvested from planted trees, particularly in the season when fruits are scarce. Second, children might have access to a more diversified diet than adults through cooperative breeding (Hrdy 2005b). Allomaternal care, or children's care by non-parental adults, might increase children's access to the wide range of foods consumed in several households. Indeed, such practice has been associated to the enhancement of infant survival (Hrdy 2005a; Kennedy 2005), so it might also relate to dietary diversity. Third, as has been reported in the case of the OrangAsli (Meyer-Rochow 2009), children participating in this study might have been exposed to different food taboos than those of adults, which could affect the types of foods that are allowed to be consumed or not.

These three reasons, however, do not fully suffice to explain dietary differences between children's and adults' diets, as, in the societies included in this study, preadolescents are largely in charge of their own food provisioning. Therefore, the last potential pathway through which children might increase their dietary diversity is through the results of their own productive activities. Indigenous children's contributions to productive activities, such as foraging and agriculture, have been largely documented (Hawkes et al. 1995; Hewlett et al. 2011). For example, Hawkes et al. (1995) report that Hadza children living in the Eastern Rift forage for tubers, fruit, and berries, sometimes engaging in long excursions to gain access to remote foraging areas. Similarly, Meriam children, coastal-foragers in the Mer Island of Melanesia, are capable fishermen able to supplement adult fish provisioning (Bird and Bliege Bird 2002). Similar findings have been found amongst Mikea children in Madagascar (Tucker and Young 2005) and even Tsimane' (Aiello 2013) and Baka children (Gallois 2016). Indeed, previous studies have reported that children's food self-procurement can reach up to 50% of their caloric needs (Bird and Bliege Bird 2002; Tucker and Young 2005). And we argue that this form of food acquisition can also make children's diets relatively different from those of adults, potentially resulting in higher dietary diversity.

The third finding of this work refers to the lack of substantial differences between boys' and girls' diets or amongst the diets of children of different ages. The finding goes against our intuition, as we had argued that different involvement in productive activities would be reflected in dietary differences. It is possible that the prevalence of food sharing levels up potential differences in food procurement which are not reflected in actual food consumption. Food sharing is a widespread, culturallyestablished practice in the three populations studied (Reyes-García et al. 2016), and has also been largely documented amongst children of different cultural traditions (e.g., Boyette 2013; Crittenden and Zes 2015; Tam et al. 2014). However, while the explanation is plausible, it requires further research to be tested. Moreover, this finding raises one additional question: given that children have greater dietary diversity than adults, but there are no differences among children of different ages, when and why do children lose this greater spread of food diversity?

We only found two remarkable exceptions to the patterns mentioned above. First, we found significant dietary differences between Tsimane' boys and girls. Some research amongst the Tsimane' suggests emerging inequalities in food distribution within households, with men eating more fresh fish and meat when they are away from home (see Godoy et al. 2007; Zycherman 2013). This pattern could be also occurring amongst children. Second, we found a tendency for more diverse diets amongst children attending school. We do not have a consistent explanation for why children attending school enjoy more diversified diets than children not attending, other than the potential impact of nutritional programs conveyed through public schools, which are present in Tsimane' and Punan Tubu but not in Baka schools.

Our final finding relates to food group sources. Children participating in this study rely on a complex combination of locallysourced and market foods. While we lack baseline data on children's diets, our ethnographic understanding indicates that the consumption of market-foods could be on the rise. Moreover, at least one previous study in one of the studied areas also suggests so, as it reports that remote Punan Tubu communities have a more diversified diet and better nutritional status than communities closer to the market (Dounias et al. 2007). It is also worth noticing that most market-foods are items in the “oil and fat,” “sweets and spices,” and “beverages” food groups, food groups whose increased consumption has been directly associated with higher levels of diabetes and a growing epidemic of obesity amongst Indigenous children all over the world (Reading and Wien 2009; Valery et al. 2012). Thus, while our data suggest that the percentage of market foods consumed by children in the sample is lower than the percentages reported for other Indigenous Peoples (Kuhnlein et al. 2004), the trend could indeed be signaling emerging transformations in local diets.

Conclusion

Findings from this work suggest that Indigenous children remain highly dependent on forest resources and subsistence agriculture for their diets, with fruits and vegetables and animal sourced food largely coming from forests and agricultural plots. If access to diversified landscapes (including both forests and agricultural plots) contributes to increase the presence of diverse nutritious foods in the diet (i.e., fruits, vegetables, and animal source foods), then current drivers of landscape homogenization should be understood also in terms of food sovereignty. Most importantly, because childhood is a vulnerable life stage requiring higher food inputs to promote growth and maintain health, the implications of the ongoing environmental changes on Indigenous children's diets should be carefully evaluated. Policies addressing Indigenous Peoples' food security should consider the distinctive strategies and perspectives of children with regard to food and diets. This study shows the specificities and particularities of Indigenous children's diets in three different groups across the tropics. The higher diversity in children's versus adults' diets calls for policy efforts to broaden the focus of food security policies and pay attention to the food procurement strategies of Indigenous children, as well as their tight relationships to their forests, thus adopting a biocultural approach.