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Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

According to the CDC, the average weight [1] of a black woman aged 20-39 years in the US is 179 lbs, 158 lbs for a white woman. Converting to BMI (to adjust for height differences), the story is the same with an average 30.2 vs 26.7, or 'moderately obese' versus 'overweight.'

Remove any notions of race and compare the stats based entirely on equivalent weight/BMI I you will find nearly all differences would disappear. Fatness is literally killing our nation (with our life expectancy continuing to decline) and currently blacks are the fattest group in America. This can lead to false correlations laden with completely unjustified identity politics.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad347.pdf

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Then why is asthma medication less effective on Latino's and African Americans? And why did my friend have to visit 5 doctors and it wasn't until he found the Black doctor that his skin condition (which is common to only African Americans regardless of weight) was properly diagnosed and treated?

I'm not saying weight is not a problem, I come from a black family where unhealthy diets are a tradition (but that leads back to the fact that traditional african american diets come from the slave food which was unhealthy but taken in as cultural meals, much longer discussion there), but that does not mean that taking out weight in this discussion solves all or even most of the issues at hand.

As well using your same logic, why do Asians who typically have a lower BMI than white individuals have higher incidences of Diabetes? It's not one size fits all

https://health.usnews.com/wellness/articles/2016-03-11/asian...

> that leads back to the fact that traditional african american diets come from the slave food which was unhealthy but taken in as cultural meals

Is this really true? What foods did slaves in the US eat that are still regularly eaten today? What about black Americans that didn’t descend from slaves, are they not affected?

Is it not more likely that this effect is due to economic reasons (ie in recent years low quality food is significantly cheaper to obtain)

> Asians who typically have a lower BMI than white individuals have higher incidences of Diabetes?

Perhaps I missed it but where in that link does it say Asians have "higher incidences of Diabetes" than whites?

It is an indirect correlation. BMI is a factor related to the likelihood of having diabetes, and what's considered a safe range for white people is an unsafe range for Asians. Thus if you have a white person at a 25 BMI and an Asian person at 25 BMI, the Asian person has a higher likelihood of getting diabetes.

"The educated [Asian] population knows that they're getting diabetes and hypertension and all these things at a much lower BMI, but if you're in a culture where everybody's really fat and you're thin, you tend to go around and think, 'Well, I'm protected,'"

oh its mentioned in the linked research

> However, the impact of increasing BMI on risk of hypertension and diabetes was significantly greater in Asians. For each one unit increase in BMI, Asians were significantly more likely to have hypertension (OR 1.15; 95 % CI 1.13–1.18) compared to non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10900-013-9792-...

>Remove any notions of race and compare the stats based entirely on equivalent weight/BMI I you will find nearly all differences would disappear.

This is not only false, but dangerously false. We are in the process of discovering that certain classes of popularly-prescribed drugs (eg ACE inhibitors for blacks, certain chemotherapy drugs for Asians) are ineffective or even toxic for populations not represented in the relevant drug development research cohorts. It's not identity politics to note that pharmacokinetics can differ between individuals and populations. These differences do not explain all of the population-level morbidity and mortality differences between ethnicities, but they are significant when investigating differences between groups on the same course of treatment.

The same is true for men and women. The narrative we like to repeat is that men and women are the same except for the shapes of their genitals but there are numerous biochemical and metabolic differences that should affect dosages for several classes of medication [1]. The real tragedy is that many drug trials were never done with women so we may not even be sure of what the doses should should be [2]. The same problem exists with children. These are not simple body weight issues.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychotropic-drug...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4800017/

>The same problem exists with children.

I feel like the problem is worse with children due to them having a developing brain, where the impacts of medication can have impacts into changing the very person taking them. I am especially concerned with medication for mental illnesses that are prescribed to children, often times off label, but the risk exists for most any medication.

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