ABSTRACT
Nutrition began its constitution as an independent profession in the 1930s. It has achieved the status of higher education in 1967. With the emergence of the Collective Health Space in the 1970s, it was verified the construction of an area of Food and Nutrition in Collective Health. Nutritionists integrate this multiprofessional field in its different spheres. To what extent does this insertion correspond to an integration into the Collective Health Space or does it persists as a subspace articulated to it? In order to partially answer this question, the characteristics of nutritionists in the postgraduate programs were analyzed from the Lattes curricula of all those that comprised the permanent framework of courses in 2010. The indicators used were: main area of activity, doctoral area, research lines and publications, among others. Among the 944 professors, 42 were nutritionists (4.4%). Of these, 47.6% indicated Collective Health and 42.9% indicated Nutrition as the first activity area. Nutrition and Food was referred as the first line of research by 40.5%; and Epidemiology by 14.3%. The topic of the thesis was Epidemiology for 42.9%, followed by Evaluation (14.3%) and Social Sciences (11.9%). These findings are indicative that, although nutritionists have a place in the Collective Health Space, their positioning evidences strategies of belonging to the field of origin.
KEYWORDS
Nutritionists; Public health; Health postgraduate programs