tend to be less healthy due to a founder effect – really a founder legacy that had to do with slavery.
This isn’t an anti-slavery post – well, actually it is…
Slavery was a brutal event in history that lasted, at a minimum 100 years.
During slavery, the people who managed to survive were worked incredibly hard physically.
In order to work as hard as they did, and still survive long enough to procreate and actually maintain a pregnancy while heavily engaged in manual labor, their serum chemistries would have had to be resistant to
the effects of the work – things like their blood glucose levels, lipid levels would have had to be higher in general to supply the energy necessary to maintain positive or even neutral energy balances.
The people who didn’t survive were likely the ones whose blood glucose and lipid levels were genetically lower that those of the others. So they likely died without passing on their genes to offspring.
Fast forward a hundred years and change and suddenly our society is such that it no longer requires the strenous manual labor that was a normal thing even 100 years prior. In addition, the energy density of food has increased substantially in the last 50 years.
In addition, advertising for tobacco products has been found to be consistently higher in African-American neighborhoods and magazines than in White neighborhoods and magazines according to a study presented in the scholarly journal Public Health Reports by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researcher Brian Primack.
It all makes me wonder how much of our history is going to affect our children’s health in the long term. As much as I don’t want to suffer from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other stress related diseases and syndromes such as depression, I certainly don’t want my children to do the same.
How to solve that idea…hmm…another post I think…
this is a great post. i, too, think blacks should work harder. like in the good old days.