Race & medicine
Joel pointed me to this
article about race differences in obesity. Not too surprisingly-blacks are heaviest and whites the lightest (people of Asian ancestry aren't included I guess) with Hispanics in the middle (the race of Hispanics can be anything of course-as much as 10% of Mexico's genetic heritage might be black African for instance).
The easiest way to explain the result is that the different races eat differently. But there are
genetic factors in obesity. And one Native American group-the
Pima-are assumed to have a strong genetic propensity for obesity in the context of a modern diet and all the concomitant health problems associated with obesity. I wonder if the high obesity
rate of Americans is partly due to the ubiquity of ethnic restaurants. Americans of northern European ancestry eat at Italian or Mexican restaurants-while black Americans consume pasta and meat-heavy dishes. Does anyone wonder if perhaps there may be problems with pumping people with foods that might taste good-but are not attuned to metabolisms developed over thousands of years of selective evolution?
On a slightly disconcerting note-I actually had a discussion with a friend of mine-a third year medical student-about these topics. It was a very novel way to look at things as far as he was concerned, he really hadn't been trained to think in these terms and he was in his second year of rotations!