Why Hispanic-Americans live longer: A mystery that has puzzled researchers | Hacker News Reader

Why Hispanic-Americans live longer: A mystery that has puzzled researchers

washingtonpost.com

31 pointsnether46 comments

It's a bit concerning that it's labeled a paradox, as you only use that word if it's strongly counter intuitive. That implies everyone who uses that term expected Hispanics to not live longer.

When you see that trend in the data surely you should say "that's interesting, I wonder if it's accurate and hence something to do with being Hispanic" rather than "By what devilry does my data suggest that Hispanics live longer?".

Not really concerning to me.

For example, what if my data showed that less affluent people do better in school, or have better health, than more affluent people.

Would that surprise you, and would a healthy response be to check your data again before chasing after this conclusion?

I think generally, yes, because it conflicts with our notions (from earlier studies) about how socioeconomic status affects success in schools and in health.

And that's likely at the core of the 'paradox', that hispanic communities are relatively less affluent than a median citizen, and that lower socioeconomic status is normally linked to negative, rather than positive, affects on health. The surprise isn't really concerning.

I mean I get your point, it's important to remain open-minded and ask open-minded questions, as opposed to questions which carry lots of preconceived ideas about the world. But in this case it doesn't seem all that concerning to me.

The study controls for income, so in theory the effect of lower socioeconomic status is removed. It is effectively saying fewer Hispanic people at a certain income level will die relative to people of other races at the same income level.

This is a paradox especially if your prior is that longevity and race should be unrelated.

"In the United States, Hispanics die at slower rates than non-Hispanic whites. This is true even before accounting for differences in incomes and health-care access, which put Hispanics at a disadvantage."

> That implies everyone who uses that term expected Hispanics to not live longer.

That's a totally reasonable assumption given that we know: 1) Hispanics on average have lower SES; 2) longevity is correlated with SES.

>It's a bit concerning that it's labeled a paradox, as you only use that word if it's strongly counter intuitive. That implies everyone who uses that term expected Hispanics to not live longer.

Considering that they live shorter in Mexico and Latin America, and that they are less afluent that the mean in the US, it makes sense to expect that.

Why doesn't the article mention genetics as a possible factor?

This is the obvious answer. Another, I believe, is a sense of community (lower societal stress).

Yes

After all, "hispanics" are Native-Americans genetically (though there are differences between regions)

Maybe they are more adapted to something (may be even the corn-heavy modern American diet)

I guess the societal factors play an important part as well.

Lets take in mind that genetics are complicated here.

Spaniards where a mix of mediterranean and african people: Arabs, Jews, Celts (Irish/French), Catholics (Italian/French), Hindi (Gipsies), Phoenician from the actual Israel, Guanche from Canary Islands, Dutch/Scottish/English sailors settled in Cadiz... and after this, native americans and sub saharians entered in the family and things went really crazy in this sense.

So a Spaniard and a North African can be genetically very close. And a Spaniard and a Jew can be closer genetically than an american Jew that could be in fact a mix of Mediterranean Jews and English. By the same reason some afroamericans can be pretty close to hispanics genetically. Is the culture and the history what is different, not the genetics.

The article doesn't mention the other obvious comparisons, the non-black latin american countries, such as Argentina and Chile.

For instance, Chile ranks higher than the US here, despite being a poorer country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...

... and probably keeps doing so, as there was no actual explanation given.

Is this click-bait? Very annoying, at least.

Thought it was an interesting question to be honest... I'm fine with the occasional article asking a question without immediately providing answers.

It makes a strong case for the gap to actually exist (which has been contested in the past), by showing studies unaffected by immigration which still indicate a gap.

And it also offers some answers. The most compelling one is that it's cultural, behavioural, relating to diets, smoking, drinking etc. The argument for this is that the gap is smaller for immigrants who are 2nd, 3rd generation, and who have assimilated more of the typical US culture.

One of the overlooked factors is religion.

South Americans are predominantly Catholic and less prone to drinking/smoking and end up fostering a community

Less prone to drinking. I see my priest drinking wine every week at mass. But seriously, I don't think Hispanics are less prone to drinking. Is that true?

Antidotial, but my mom's side of the family is hispanic. Her ancestors arrived 1850's. None of the women drank, nor smoked much. The men drank, and smoked like cast members on Mad Men. They were all surprising healthy? Even the one's who did get bypasses and diabetics--all lived into their 80's and 90's; functional--driving, working, and even dating. My grandfater drank 12 beers/day and smoked two packs of cigarettes/day, and ate fast food(loved Taco Bell), and lived to 80 something. Plus, he lived most of his life in the smoggiest parts of LA.

Now, my dad's Irish side of the family, at least the men, died in their 60's. I have a feeling I will take after my Irish ancestors. Maybe, I will get lucky?

I am glad to hear something positive about Hispanics--too often it's negative. I always leave out my Hispanic heritage because it's just not worth the stereotypes.

Although that sounds like a Freakonomics type explanation, it seems pretty unlikely that smoking and drinking rates would not already have been assessed and excluded. These are two pretty big factors at the top of the list when examining life expectancy.

Also, if your hypothesis was true, then it would need to hold for other [Roman] Catholic groups for that to be the key factor. That does not seem to be the case as, according to Wolfram Alpha, the top life expectancy (at 84.4 years) is Macau, followed by Japan (83.6) then Switzerland (82.6) and Australia (82.5) tied with Andorra. Italy is 6th though.

While there are Roman Catholic countries high up, there are also higher ranked, non-Roman Catholic ones.

There are many convincing cases of benefit derived from religious faith but I'm not sure you can make such a case for life expectancy.

My argument is not about Catholicism, but religion and social organization itself. Most of these countries have either a homogeneous population or a common gathering element(Catholicism for Hispanics)

Most non-Hispanic Americans end up not having a common element or belonging to such a community. The effects on health may vary from less binge drinking to a more helpful family.

I am Mexican and live in Mexico. It is true that family ties are quite strong here, but drinking is also very strong. I don't know where you get the idea of less binge drinking.

Growing up in a latin american, predominantly Catholic country, I can assure you that they are not less prone to drinking. Smoking was less common, but because of the culture, not religion.

Drinking can different between different cultures. There are cultures that drink the same amounts (per capita) but have fewer alcoholics, because they see drinking as something social, e.g. related to eating with friends and family etc, not as something you do even alone or to cure your blues.

I don't think it is this. Anecdotal, but I have been raised in a hispanic household and lived in some South American countries.

Hispanic is a pretty stupid category, but people described as Hispanic-Americans are usually to some degree South/Central American indigenous by descent - making them on average 3 or 4 inches shorter than black or white Americans.

Shorter people live longer. It's been speculated that women's longevity advantage over men is determined entirely by height.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002432050...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1600586

Black, white and Mexican-American mean heights:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad347.pdf

It's probably cultural... latin-americans, and Europeans with latin culture (France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc) usually tend to take life "less seriously" (we all know the awful toll stress takes in our bodies/minds), and also eat healthier introducing other paradoxes like the "French Paradox"[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_paradox

france a country with latin culture? not really..

The term was made up to remark that Latin America is closer to France than to other countries like England and USA.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America#Etymology_and_def... ):

The idea that a part of the Americas has a linguistic affinity with the Romance cultures as a whole can be traced back to the 1830s, in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a "Latin race", and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe" in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe", "Anglo-Saxon America" and "Slavic Europe".[8] The idea was later taken up by Latin American intellectuals and political leaders of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, who no longer looked to Spain or Portugal as cultural models, but rather to France.[9] The term was first used in Paris in an 1856 conference by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao[10] and the same year by the Colombian writer José María Torres Caicedo in his poem "Two Americas".[11] The term Latin America was supported by the French Empire of Napoleon III during the French invasion of Mexico as a way to include France among countries with influence in the Americas and to exclude Anglophone countries and played a role in his campaign to imply cultural kinship of the region with France, transform France into a cultural and political leader of the area, and install Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor of the Second Mexican Empire.[12] This term was also used in 1861 by French scholars in La revue des races Latines, a magazine dedicated to the Pan-Latinism movement.[13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages

There are some pretty major differences between eating habits in Mexico, and, say, Italy. The people in the former are statistically quite obese, whereas Italians tend to be in pretty good shape.

The French Paradox is basically a politically correct way for standard american diet believers to talk about how paleo style diets mysteriously seem healthier. How could it possibly be that lower carb, less processed, higher natural fat diets lead to health when the big agribusinesses who purchased the official USDA guidelines to increase their profits insist on the opposite as the path to health despite the evidence of the obesity epidemic? With a strong side dish of puritan guilt, if it tastes good it must be bad for you, and french-style cooking usually tastes pretty good.

Is Mexican cuisine diet the new Mediterranean one?

Some fraudulent quack will surely misinterpret it on tv ...

Could it be that these are not "true" Hispanics, but they have mixed genes? Mixing in the gene pool usually has positive effects.

what is a "true hispanic"?

Peoples mixed with Spaniards. The "span" part of Hispanic.

Huh?

Hispanic means a lot of different things in a lot of different places. The root word comes from Hispania, which was the Roman name for the Iberian peninsula. That includes Portugal, so some people consider Portuguese descendants to be Hispanics, although most don't.

However, (AFAICT) nobody considers Hispanic to be "mixed" peoples; most include mixed peoples in the category but there are some who only use the term to refer to white peoples in Spanish Central & South America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic

from your link:

> The term "Hispanic" broadly refers to the culture, peoples, or nations with a historical link to Spain.

I guess that was what I was getting at, but I do take your point that it is not as cut-and-dry as my short remark made it seem. So today I have learned something new to me.

Hispania is the Latin name for the Iberian Peninsula (Spain + Portugal).

However, the term Hispanic usually refers to people from Spanish speking countries in the Americas (ie excluding Brazil, Guyana, Belize, etc), regardless of race.

It's nothing. Americans spent "Native American" on their tribes and they don't want to include the other native American tribes under the same label.

"Hispanic" is a useless label because then you subdivide into "non-white hispanic" and "white hispanic" at which point it's just "Native American" and "Caucasian". Not to mention that a person who is "non-white hispanic" has no ties with Spain and all ties with Native Americans.

The majority of Mexicans are Mestizos, a European and Native American mix.

As a hispanic/latino... we are already pretty mixed as it is.

If I was to take a guess is because of our (usually) strong bonds with family and friends. And somehow that helps with stress.

Infant mortality rates are lower for Hispanic babies born in the US to non-US born parents. This is a pretty well known fact in the public health research.

See http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6026a6.htm?s_cid=...

I vaguely remember that the effect disappears for second generation births. Don't have a citation handy for that though.

(Edit: pdf link since the above link seemed truncated - http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_06.pdf )

I'm probably being naive here, but aren't Asian countries' low mortality levels recognized as a result of their diets? If there is one staple one could point to as being shared between Hispanics and Asians, must that staple be rice? I just wonder if the choice of main starch - which is consumed so commonly across cultures - distinguished Hispanic Americans from other Americans, who are more likely to rely on corn or wheat as their staple starch.

Don't forget beans. A 20 point drop in cholesterol might explain the difference [1].

Perhaps the lack of access to healthcare explains the difference. Healthcare is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. [2].

Why does the effect dissipate for the second and third generation? My theory: Mexican restaurants in the U.S. supply a free bottomless basket of fried corn chips with every meal.

[1] http://nutritionfacts.org/topics/beans/ [2] http://nutritionfacts.org/2013/07/16/dr-gregers-new-annual-y...

Yep, I read some of the comments here, then I read the article kindly submitted to open the thread from top to bottom, and then I read all the rest of the previous comments here. The article is more interesting than I expected from the first comments I read. Particularly interesting is the issue of whether or not earlier epidemiological studies were counting the same people over the course of their lifespan, or whether some "Hispanic" people in the United States were moving back and forth internationally, or not being counted at all in epidemiological surveillance, either of which might badly skew the figures.

One question that came up in several comments is what is meant by the "ethnicity" designation term "Hispanic," which is used only in the United States for epidemiological studies like this. The Census Bureau says

"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm

In other words, we can't count on "Hispanic" people having any particular gene assemblage at the individual level and it's difficult even to assume that Hispanic people really, truly share a common culture that differs from non-Hispanic culture. There is a LOT of noise to go with whatever signal is carried by the designation "Hispanic," and people's self-designation by that term or not has changed a lot in my lifetime.

But, as the article points out, there may be some good news here for people in the United States in general. "Understanding the origins of the Hispanic paradox will tell us a lot about the future of health care in the United States. And if the Hispanic advantage does have something to do with culture — with strong, supportive communities and healthy behaviors — then that is something that the rest of the country can emulate." Better understanding the long-term, steady drop in all-cause mortality in the United States at all ages[1] may help us find ways to keep that trend[2] going, further lengthening lifespans for all Americans.

[1] "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why" http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

[2] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

Diet?

Less pancakes, bacon, fries, pizza, hamburguers (and more vegetables and grains). Such greasy food might have sense on a hostile cold weather but that doesn't mean its good on the long term.

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