[Considerations for an epidemiology of food and eating: A genealogy of nutritional studies in Ecuador].

This article analyzes two of the most important studies on nutrition that have been carried out in Ecuador in the last fifty years. The objective is to justify the need for an alimentary epidemiology capable of looking at the entire process of social reproduction and the food system as well as the expressions of each in different ways of life, overcoming a purely individual and biologistic perspective. The article proposes that eating be studied as a total social fact within the school of thought of critical epidemiology, recognizing the existence of three different levels of reality - the general, particular and singular - as well as the existence of a margin of relative autonomy of subjects in the process of determination of food consumption and nutritional status.