Sugar-sweetened food, intergenerationality, and food moralities in urban Chinese families.

With the application of intergenerational theory as its analytical framework, this paper seeks to provide new insights into the social construction of sugar-sweetened food and food practices in the context of contemporary urban China, drawing on 16 months' in-depth qualitative research in the city of Chongqing. From an intergenerational perspective, it argues that although adults and children both typically construct sugar-sweetened food as "bad" for health based on the logic of its biological meaning, there are more generational differences in the understandings of sociocultural meanings associated with these foods, which are the main reasons may lead to intergenerational conflict. Caregivers tend to regard their control of children's sugar-sweetened food intake as a means to discipline their children's bodies and develop food moralities. However, children themselves are likely to perform sugar-sweetened food practices as a way of socializing and sometimes resisting the control of caregivers. Based on this, this paper further shows that these diverse views are rooted in the tension between caregivers' anxiety about the transmission of food moralities through intensive parenting practices and children's agency in food consumption in contemporary urban China. These findings enhance intergenerational-theoretical research and highlight the need to move beyond the analytical framework of "behaviour change" in related food and health studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]