Ethnicity, It's More Than the Color of Your Skin
February 23, 2021
How much do you really know about how your ethnicity impacts your risk for chronic disease? Your ethnic background can put you at an increased risk for certain conditions like high blood pressure and osteoporosis, and may even affect your body composition. Luckily, if you’re aware, you can compensate with healthy lifestyle choices.
Like other genetic factors, your ethnicity can shape your health, body composition, body type, and risk of chronic illness. Different ethnic groups and races tend to have slightly different body types and be more or less at risk for different health conditions. One well-known example we can point to in the research is that Black people tend to have higher blood pressure than other ethnic groups, which can put them at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). In addition to ethnicity, other factors that are out of your control—like your age, gender, and family history—can also play a role in your health.
However, knowing how your ethnicity, age, gender, and family history affect your health can equip you to take charge of your lifestyle so you can optimize your wellness.
Ethnicity and chronic disease risk
Different ethnicities and races have different levels of susceptibility to a number of chronic conditions. They also generally have different body types characterized by unique patterns of body fat distribution and body composition. Here’s how your ethnicity may influence your body type or risk factors for chronic diseases:
Black: Black people tend to have higher blood pressure than other groups, which increases their risk of heart disease. However, Black women typically have a more favorable fat distribution than Caucasian or Hispanic women—which can decrease their heart disease risk. Black men and women are also more likely than other races to have low iron levels, which researchers believe was shaped by the effects of malaria in Africa.
Caucasian: Caucasians, particularly Caucasian women, are more at risk of bone fractures and osteoporosis than Black or Hispanic women. Caucasian men and women also appear to be at higher risk of heart disease related to high cholesterol than other ethnic groups.
Hispanic: People of Hispanic backgrounds are more likely than Caucasians to develop type 2 diabetes, to be obese, and to die as a result of diabetes or liver disease. It’s possible that Hispanic people possess more of a genetic predisposition to retain fat, making them more susceptible to these diseases.
Asian: Asian women, in particular, are at an increased risk of osteoporosis due to poor bone density. People of Asian descent may also be more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than Caucasians.
What’s not clear is whether these various differences between ethnic groups are a result of genetics and ethnicity, if they stem from environmental or lifestyle factors that affect one ethnic group more than the others, or a combination of the two.
Other chronic disease factors
Along with ethnicity, there are other factors that may increase or decrease your risk of chronic disease. Here are just a few:
Age: As you age, it becomes more difficult for your body to recycle old cells and replace them with new, healthy cells. Because of this, aging can increase your risk of various conditions.
Gender: Men are slightly more susceptible to conditions like heart disease and type 2 diabetes because they carry excess fat in their abdomen, unlike women who typically carry it in their hips and buttocks—which presents less of a chronic disease risk. Women, on the other hand, are more susceptible to conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis.
Genetics: Your family history can also shape your body composition and disease risk. For example, some people are genetically predisposed to carry visceral fat (which fills the spaces between their organs) rather than healthier subcutaneous fat, which is just beneath the skin.
Lifestyle: Lifestyle factors include your diet, exercise, environmental exposures, whether or not you smoke, sleep habits, and stress levels—among others. Your lifestyle has a profound impact on your risk of gaining excess weight or developing chronic illnesses like diabetes or heart disease.
While most of these factors are completely out of your control, you can take charge of your lifestyle and make healthy choices to minimize your risk and help make up for other risk factors, like your age and ethnicity.
How to minimize chronic disease risk
Risk factors that can’t be changed or controlled—like age, gender, and ethnicity—don’t have to dictate your health. Lifestyle management plays a huge role in your overall health and can help combat some of your other disease risk factors. Here are some of the most important lifestyle aspects to consider:
Eat a balanced diet: Your diet can make or break your overall wellness. You should aim to eat a diet that’s rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats, and protein while trying to avoid added sugars and highly processed foods. And, if you’re interested in weight optimization, whether that means gaining or losing weight for you, then diet is key. To understand your calorie needs, it may be wise to invest in resting metabolic rate testing. Blood biomarker testing can also provide guidance about specific changes that should be made to your diet (for instance, to identify nutrient deficiencies).
Exercise regularly: Regular exercise can give you a more favorable body fat percentage. While cardio can help you burn fat (while also improving your heart health and bone density), strength training can improve your muscle mass and increase your metabolic rate, or the number of calories you burn at rest.
Avoid smoking: Smoking is a risk factor for several chronic conditions, so you should avoid it altogether if possible and try your hardest to quit if you’re a current smoker.
Get enough sleep: The importance of sleep for your health can’t be overstated. Sleep is your body’s vital rest and recovery time, and not getting enough of it increases your risk of a host of chronic illnesses.
Minimize stress: Stress can be terrible for your physical health as well as your mental health. The stress hormone cortisol causes your body to store harmful visceral fat in your belly when it’s present at high levels.
Monitor your health: Finally, proactively monitoring your health by regularly seeing a doctor, wellness expert, or dietitian, assessing your body composition via DEXA body scan or Bod Pod, and checking your biomarkers via blood panel can help you identify issues before they turn into chronic conditions.
By following a healthy lifestyle that includes proactive health monitoring, you can neutralize some of the uncontrollable factors that may negatively impact your health. If you’re ready to get going on your health journey, a great starting point would be comprehensive health testing (including DEXA scans, metabolic rate testing, and bloodwork) with our team at Fitnescity.
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