- Overweight Latin-American
When Frida Sepulveda was 8, she began developing dark folds of skin around her neck. It is a well known sign of type 2 diabetes. Her mother, Blanca Sepulveda, who has watched other family members struggle with diabetes and obesity, was devastated to see her daughter experiencing similar health problems.
Frida is now age 11, about 5 foot 6 inches tall and weighs a bulky 180 pounds. She is considered to be clinically overweight and is in the high-risk group for childhood obesity and adult obesity, especially because many of her relatives have also suffered from overweight and childhood obesity, and to be considered within a healthy BMI, she would need to grow at least 6 inches to have a borderline normal weight BMI.
According to the 2007 National Survey of Children’s health, 18.1 percent of Latino high school students were overweight and 16.6 percent were suffering from childhood obesity.
Aside from genetics, the problem with childhood obesity and overweight Latin-American children has a lot to do with their social and cultural boundaries and habits. Even Frida’s mother thinks that family and cultural standards are a major contributor to Frida’s, and many other Latin-American children’s', childhood obesity and overweight. “The way I was raised… you don’t [leave] the dinner table until you’re done with all your food. That’s instilled in you,” said Sepulveda.
Such behavior makes sense in countries such as Mexico, where many work for what would be weekly or daily wages for the month, and to be wasteful is looked down on. To create a parallel comparison, following the Great Depression, U.S. children were malnourished at record numbers which resulted in government subsidies for school lunches and a changed attitude in the dining room. Dr. Michael Goran, director of the USC’s Childhood Obesity Research Center, had this to say “You can’t just try to change someone’s behavior necessarily without trying to change their environment.”
Another factor is the immense amount of low-skill immigrants pouring over our borders as the result of an immigration system that stresses kinship ties over skills and education. As a result, according to studies by the Heritage Society, one-third of all immigrants live in families which the head of the household lacks a high schooled education; and first-generation immigrants, as is the case for Frida’s mother, and their families, who are one-sixth of the U.S. population, comprise one-fourth of all poor persons in the United States. In addition, first-generation Hispanic immigrants and their families now comprise 9 percent of the U.S. population, but account for 17 percent of all poor persons in the U.S.; and children in Hispanic immigrant families now comprise 11.7 percent of all children in the U.S., but account for 22 percent of all poor children.
What this translates to is a disproportionate number of Latin American children living in poor neighborhoods. In some of these areas, the nearest full-service supermarket may be a town over or even further. Cheap and easily available fast-food is appealing to parents who may be working late into the night and only aggravates the childhood obesity and overweight problem. In fact, research has shown that affluent neighborhoods have not only a higher availability of healthy food, but the cost of healthy food is also lower.
Another aggravating factor is the disadvantaged neighborhoods that many Hispanic children live in. Exercise is a tricky problem if it involves being beat up, robbed, raped, or worse. To that end, research indicates that Latinos living in tightly-knit communities, regardless of poverty, often get more exercise than those in more mixed neighborhoods.
The above factors are incredibly disadvantageous, and could alone be the explanation the overweight and childhood obesity disparity amongst Hispanic children. Exercise and lifestyle habits are the two largest contributors to childhood obesity and overweight and simply put Hispanic children are disproportionately denied the opportunity to practice either healthily.
How can we fix this problem?
Researchers and community advocates alike are attempting to combat the Latino childhood obesity and overweight problem. But the multitude of factors makes facing the issue like trying to hit a moving target and the results of interventions have been mixed.
Associations such as the Healthy Latino Families in Milwaukee has seen success in battling childhood obesity and overweight problems by improving diets and decreasing sedentary time through their programs; however, USC’s Goran, who worked with Latino teenagers over 16 weeks to improve their diet by promoting fiber-rich and low-sugar diets, found that at the end of four months, there were “no significant improvement in the outcomes.”