La Dieta

Congratulations! Welcome home! You must be exhausted, I mean you did just give birth to a healthy, happy baby. That is hard work! I hear it is one of the most physically taxing events your body can go through. I mean you have just spent the last nine months carrying and nourishing another living being with your own body. Then after hours and hours of being in labor, in pain, you have pushed that small child out of your body and into the big scary world. That is heavy stuff right there. Might I offer you a cup of drinking chocolate? Some cheese? A tortilla?

Many women in El Salvador, especially those who live in the more rural areas, adhere to what is known as 'la dieta' (or the diet) after child birth. This is a very strict diet that consists of chocolate, cheese, tortillas and sometimes chicken. I am not kidding, this is a real thing. They must follow this diet for the first 40 days of their new babies life. And interestingly enough, if something goes wrong and the baby does not survive, the mother must still follow la dieta.

Most women in my community follow la dieta after child birth. It can be hard to see these wonderful happy babies and know that these mothers are not properly taking care of themselves. It is too easy imagine what kind of nutritional deficits these kids are starting out with. Women have told me that the chocolate is consumed to help bring the milk when the mother starts breast feeding. As for the other foods I do not really know what their significance is. I have heard la dieta is followed in order to control odor, but I think many of these women are just blindly following their traditions. Salvadorians can be quite superstitious.

It is very interesting to see women who believed in something like la dieta, but have since had their minds changed. For instance a woman in my community was told that she could not get pregnant while she was breast feeding. That turned out to be false, and now now she has two daughters 10 months apart. She no longer believes that superstition, but puts all of her faith behind la dieta. Many women here also wear red bands of fabric around their waist during pregnancy. They believe that this wards off the moon which can, during a full moon, cause your child to have birth defects. They believe that the moon 'eats' the part of the child that comes out deformed. Cleft lip, for example, is often blamed on the evils of the moon.  

Some of these women are not very educated, but some are. It is hard to believe that so many people follow beliefs like la dieta in during this day and age. The world is so advanced, with so much information at our fingertips on the internet, that it is shameful to see so many women hurting themselves and their children in this way. Women get defensive if you try to even talk to them about alternatives to la dieta. They raised their children that way, their mothers raised them that way and their grandmothers raised their mothers that way. This is what they know, and change can be intimidating.