Both sets of parents in the Hispanic-American and African-American families were overweight, which they did not see as a problem for them: they said that their parents also had 'meat on their bones.' I connected this with the attitudes of my own grandparents. While not overweight, they were inclined to see chubbiness in children as cute, particularly given the poverty and hunger in which they had grown up. This belief was echoed in the Southeast Asian family I interviewed.

Health protection and health restoration were less suspiciously viewed than I anticipated: in my preliminary research I read that African-Americans who had experienced racism in the medical system were often mistrustful of doctors and nurses (African-American parents more likely to report distrust of medical research, 2009, JAMA and Archives Journals). My personal interviews indicated that health protection and restoration was of great priority, and overall all of the parents trusted their...
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