Representações sociais sobre alimentação saudável comportamento alimentar de pessoas idosas

Abstract

Population aging is a global reality. Due to a sustained increase in life expectancy in Brazil, there has been an increase in the burden of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the main causes of death in Brazil, which are associated with an inadequate lifestyle, including inadequate nutrition. Because of this, there is growing interest in the literature on the study of behavior and healthy and unhealthy eating patterns of the population, considered useful outcomes to support the creation of nutritional guidelines. Objective: to analyze social representations about healthy foods for elderly people and their impact on eating behavior. Methods: This is an exploratory research, with a mixed approach, based on the Theory of Social Representations, in the city of Recife. The target group for investigation was elderly people, selected by non-probabilistic sampling, treated in the Public Health Services Network, in the outpatient clinic of the state hospital. All elderly people cared for in the units aged sixty or over, of both sexes, who agreed to participate were included. Elderly people who are in a situation of physical or emotional frailty or cognitive impairment were excluded. Data were collected after consent from the collection site and approval by the Ethics and Research Committee of the UFPB Health Sciences Center. A semi-structured interview was used based on the Theory of Social Representations, containing questions based on the theoretical framework of social representations; and in the second part: the personal characteristics of the participants, in addition to an instrument for identifying food consumption markers. The data was analyzed using the Content Analysis Technique. The recording units were identified for categorization and frequency counting. A corpus was organized for Textual Analysis, previously transcribed and organized, processed with the aid of the IRaMuTeQ software, version 0.7 alpha 2 (Interface de R pourles Analyzes Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires) to make inferences. Thus, the Descending Hierarchical Classification (CHD) was used for the lexicographic analysis of the textual material using the registration units and text segments, depending on the frequency of reduced forms (lemmatized words). A frequency >3 and 2>3.84 (p<0.005) was considered for analysis purposes. Furthermore, similarity analysis was used using the IRaMuTeQ software to study the organization of the elements to compose the investigated representation. Results: The sample was composed of 101 elderly people, predominantly women (n=87, 86.1%), between 60 and 69 years old (n=75, 74.3%), with complete secondary education, main financial income provided by pension or retirement (n=60, 59.4%) of 2 to 4 minimum wages. After processing the corpus by the IRaMuTeQ software, the following were obtained: a) textual statistics, with 2503 different forms, in 15820 occurrences, with an average individual frequency of ≥3.538, 516 text segments, 422 of which were used, i.e., 81.78 % of the total corpus;; b) descending hierarchical classification, with grouping into five semantic classes - Healthy eating (class 1-19.7%-), Unhealthy eating – (Class 2–19.7%), Positioning regarding food (Class 5 - 22 .5%,), Difficulties regarding healthy eating (Class 4 - 17.1%,), Impact of information on dietary adherence (Class 3 – 21.1%). Final considerations: the results indicate that the main factors that contribute to an eating behavior identified as unhealthy in relation to the food choice of adopting healthy or unhealthy eating habits in elderly people is related to access to information and difficulties in adherence, even if there is knowledge about the composition and importance of healthy eating in the quality of life of elderly people.