Mexico’s Diabetes Epidemic

Note:  Shortly after writing this, Mexico was declared the official fattest country in the world.

As Steve Sailer has pointed out (here, here and here), Mexico is the second fattest country in the world, next to the United States, and, according to experts, on its way to becoming most obese.  I suspect that if you were to subtract the Hispanics / mestizos and blacks from the American data and only compare European Americans with Mexicans, Mexico would already be the most obese country in the world.  As was recently reported:

“With each bite into a greasy taco and slurp of a sugary drink, Mexico hurtles toward what health experts predict will be a public health crisis from diabetes-related disease.

A fifth of all Mexican women and more than a quarter of men are believed to be at risk for diabetes now. It’s already the nation’s No. 1 killer, taking some 70,000 lives a year, far more than gangster violence.”

Mexicans are facing a diabetes epidemic, perhaps the worst the world has ever seen.  Mexico currently has the second highest diabetes rate in the world, and soon expected to have the highest.

What the causes of this rapid obesity and diabetes epidemic are, health experts are still arguing.

First, Mexican food, on average, is extremely low in nutritional value and extremely high in calories.  While traditional Mexican meals already were quite high in calories and low in nutritional value, add to these recent popular food items like the chocolate filled Twinkie-like cake called “Gansito” and you have an extremely high-calorie diet.

Second, recent wealth and more contact with the USA have increased opportunities for Mexicans to eat more Westernized foods, especially fast, junk and high-carb foods. Someone on NPR recently suggested that Mexicans’ diets have drastically changed over the last decade or two.

Yet, all of this seems to be symptomatic, not getting at the real roots, for even if Mexicans’ diets have changed, they’re eating the same garbage that whites or now many North Asians are eating, yet they seem to suffer more.

Looking at the racial demographics of Mexico, Mexico is roughly 30% Amerindian and 60% Mestizo (of whom the average admixture, at least for the lower classes, is 59% Amerindian, 34% Spaniard, and 6% black).

I wonder whether something else might be going on.

Using Dennis Mangan as a point of departure, the recent increased wealth in Mexico added to increased access to calories might be acting as supernormal stimuli.  Mexicans also might have lower impulse-control, making it more difficult for them to withstand the temptation of nearly limitless access to calories.

Another possibility, given the largely non-European ancestry of most Mexicans, is that Mexicans might not be well adapted to eat Western foods and are suffering accordingly. This would be an interesting study.  Already there have been some studies showing that different races gain and lose weight differently.

Regardless, this could have real consequences in the USA.   A recent study found that people with diabetes usually make around $160,000 less over a 40-year period because of complications.   Healthcare costs for people with diabetes are around 2.3x higher than for the non-diabetic.  Current costs for diabetes in the USA are staggering.  Add to this the rising Hispanic population in the USA of whom many will probably develop diabetes and the fact that many Mexicans will come to the USA to try to receive free treatment for diabetes, and there very well could be a healthcare crisis.

Mexicans

Update:

Mexico was just declared the fattest country in the world.

“Mexicans, fattest people on planet, at genetic risk for diabetes?”