Genes/racial groups and predisposition to fat

[Guest Atlya]

On the advice of wilan, I'm creating a thread here that diverged from another thread in the pictures forum, here's the divergence.

So, what do you think, is there a propensity for certain racial groups to get fat easier. Does it come from genes or from the culture? A mixture of both perhaps?

Discuss.

[Ayumi_Chan]

Speaking on the Japanese side alone, as that's my background... I would say it really depends where you grow up that can forseeably account for weight gain in women. If you were to grow up in Japan, You generally won't see a lot of really big/chubby girls. If you do, they are on the lighter side of being chubby, (unless you're talking about the BBW Japanese models,) so Probably a little below my weight... maybe 140ish. Which may not seem like a lot but considering most Japanese women are shorter than I am, it makes sense that they would be a bit chubbier. However, that being stated, the diet and the overall fact that Japanese are becoming more stringent on guidelines for their workers keeping their waistlines in check, and just overall the abundance of places that are actually pretty healthy in terms of meals, you don't see a large population there that is BIG. However, with the westernization of Japan, especially in regards to their fast food options, it's easier for people to start eating a lot. But another thing I've noticed that has kind of subdued that a bit is the lack of free refills on drinks there. At most places the large size drink is 22oz. Some places offer refills, but you have to order the "drink bar" option. And you may not think that to cause a difference in ease of weight gain, but I do believe that it does have an effect overall.

Now on the otherhand, if you grow up here in the US, that's a whole different story. I think it's by far much easier to gain weight. I know plenty of Asian women who are quite large here in the US yet their parents are still skinny. So, conventional guess would be that she would stay skinny due to her genes, however realistic views would point to the fact that the American culture simply makes it convenient to overeat. Thus you see a lot of people from Asian cultures who grow up in the US becoming larger.

As for myself, While I'm no means fat and not a hardcore progressive gainer, I think if I lived in Japan, the availability for me to gain would be quite slim.

[SG83]

Culture yes, race/ genes no. 

Simply put, if your parents are fat, you're more likely to be fat... not because your parent's carry the "fat gene," it's because of the way your parent's eat and the things that they eat are things that you would be exposed to.  It's also culturally based in my opinion. 

Perfect example, I never ate Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc. food growing up.  My Father thought Pizza Hut or Western Sizzlin' was "eating out."  I ate the things my morbidly obese Mother, Grandmother, Aunt's, Cousins ate.  Now that I understand more about food I make better choices and get the you're strange look when I refuse meat at a family gathering... or the "what DO you eat, if you don't eat meat..." conversation.  Culturally we are exposed to certain things and predisposed to be the same unless we choose to be different from the norm. 

[Guest Atlya]

Culture yes, race/ genes no. 

Simply put, if your parents are fat, you're more likely to be fat... not because your parent's carry the "fat gene," it's because of the way your parent's eat and the things that they eat are things that you would be exposed to.  It's also culturally based in my opinion. 

Perfect example, I never ate Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc. food growing up.  My Father thought Pizza Hut or Western Sizzlin' was "eating out."  I ate the things my morbidly obese Mother, Grandmother, Aunt's, Cousins ate.  Now that I understand more about food I make better choices and get the you're strange look when I refuse meat at a family gathering... or the "what DO you eat, if you don't eat meat..." conversation.  Culturally we are exposed to certain things and predisposed to be the same unless we choose to be different from the norm. 

Meat is not innerently wrong though.

But whatever, yes, basically this at the start of the paragraph.

[wilan]

On the advice of wilan, I'm creating a thread here that diverged from another thread in the pictures forum, here's the divergence.

I'm glad you took my advice. ;D

Culture yes, race/ genes no.

Quite so.

Here's an interesting article from the New York Times on black women and fat:

Black Women and Fat

By ALICE RANDALL

Published: May 5, 2012

FOUR out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.

What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

The black poet Lucille Clifton’s 1987 poem “Homage to My Hips” begins with the boast, “These hips are big hips.” She establishes big black hips as something a woman would want to have and a man would desire. She wasn’t the first or the only one to reflect this community knowledge. Twenty years before, in 1967, Joe Tex, a black Texan, dominated the radio airwaves across black America with a song he wrote and recorded, “Skinny Legs and All.” One of his lines haunts me to this day: “some man, somewhere who’ll take you baby, skinny legs and all.” For me, it still seems almost an impossibility.

Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not.

How many white girls in the ’60s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears.

How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.

But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.

Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me that her husband, also a tenured professor and of color, begged her not to lose “the sugar down below” when she embarked on a weight-loss program.

And it’s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It’s politics too. To get a quick introduction to the politics of black fat, I recommend Andrea Elizabeth Shaw’s provocative book “The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies.” Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black woman’s body “functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.” By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.

When the biologist Daniel Lieberman suggested in a public lecture at Harvard this past February that exercise for everyone should be mandated by law, the audience applauded, the Harvard Gazette reported. A room full of thin affluent people applauding the idea of forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise appalls me. Government mandated exercise is a vicious concept. But I get where Mr. Lieberman is coming from. The cost of too many people getting too fat is too high.

I live in Nashville. There is an ongoing rivalry between Nashville and Memphis. In black Nashville, we like to think of ourselves as the squeaky-clean brown town best known for our colleges and churches. In contrast, black Memphis is known for its music and bars and churches. We often tease the city up the road by saying that in Nashville we have a church on every corner and in Memphis they have a church and a liquor store on every corner. Only now the saying goes, there’s a church, a liquor store and a dialysis center on every corner in black Memphis.

The billions that we are spending to treat diabetes is money that we don’t have for education reform or retirement benefits, and what’s worse, it’s estimated that the total cost of America’s obesity epidemic could reach almost $1 trillion by 2030 if we keep on doing what we have been doing.

WE have to change. Black women especially. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks have 51 percent higher obesity rates than whites do. We’ve got to do better. I’ve weighed more than 200 pounds. Now I weigh less. It will always be a battle.

My goal is to be the last fat black woman in my family. For me that has meant swirling exercise into my family culture, of my own free will and volition. I have my own personal program: walk eight miles a week, sleep eight hours a night and drink eight glasses of water a day.

I call on every black woman for whom it is appropriate to commit to getting under 200 pounds or to losing the 10 percent of our body weight that often results in a 50 percent reduction in diabetes risk. Sleeping better may be key, as recent research suggests that lack of sleep is a little-acknowledged culprit in obesity. But it is not just sleep, exercise and healthy foods we need to solve this problem — we also need wisdom.

I expect obesity will be like alcoholism. People who know the problem intimately find their way out, then lead a few others. The few become millions.

Down here, that movement has begun. I hold Zumba classes in my dining room, have a treadmill in my kitchen and have organized yoga classes for women up to 300 pounds. And I’ve got a weighted exercise Hula-Hoop I call the black Cadillac. Our go-to family dinner is sliced cucumbers, salsa, spinach and scrambled egg whites with onions. Our go-to snack is peanut butter — no added sugar or salt — on a spoon. My quick breakfast is a roasted sweet potato, no butter, or Greek yogurt with six almonds.

That’s soul food, Nashville 2012.

I may never get small doing all of this. But I have made it much harder for the next generation, including my 24-year-old daughter, to get large.

Alice Randall is a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Ada’s Rules.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/why-black-women-are-fat.html

[Heart and Mind]

On the other hand, the whole America is overweight

[SG83]

Meat is not innerently wrong though.

But whatever, yes, basically this at the start of the paragraph.

Oh no, nothing wrong with folks choosing to eat meat.  I was just making a culture reference that I didn't explain well enough   Basically I was saying that when I eat something different, other than whatever my family is eating I've become this strange hippy person who's going to starve to death and die according to my family.  However, when I ate the same things they ate, even though those things were really bad for me and caused me to be even more unhealthy they were pleased.  Culturally I sort of no longer fit.  I try to shorten what I'm saying so I don't type so much for people to read.  I tend to ramble.

[RotundAdmirer]

Genes can contribute to our susceptibility to gaining weight, but our environment ultimately determines how much weight we gain.

Additionally, this article (http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1338.htm) elaborates my point. Apparently, if you have a mutation in the PCSK1 gene, you are more susceptible to weight gain, but you don't necessarily become large. So, there is a genetic as well as a cultural component.

[wilan]

Genes can contribute to our susceptibility to gaining weight, but our environment ultimately determines how much weight we gain.

Additionally, this article (http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1338.htm) elaborates my point. Apparently, if you have a mutation in the PCSK1 gene, you are more susceptible to weight gain, but you don't necessarily become large. So, there is a genetic as well as a cultural component.

Yes, but the question here is about racial differences in terms of how easily people gain weight and whether they are caused by genetic or cultural factors.

[RotundAdmirer]

Yes, but the question here is about racial differences in terms of how easily people gain weight and whether they are caused by genetic or cultural factors.

Then, I still stand by my answer and add that race has nothing to do with weight gain. It's all dependent on the individual.

[wilan]

Then, I still stand by my answer and add that race has nothing to do with weight gain. It's all dependent on the individual.

Exactly. Where people go wrong is in confusing genetic with cultural factors – as if racial differences in the tendency to get fat can be explained at the genetic level.

[Guest AbeVanHelsing]

Quick question, any of you guys watch rugby or the NFL?

[YouGuysAreSick]

I know plenty of Asian women who are quite large here in the US

.......go on.

[YouGuysAreSick]

Quick question, any of you guys watch rugby or the NFL?

you know it, NFL mostly but while I was in England over the summer I started watching some rugby.

[Ayumi_Chan]

.......go on.

You obviously have never met an midwest, corn-fed, asian have you?

[Guest AbeVanHelsing]

You obviously have never met an midwest, corn-fed, asian have you?

I haven't, but look forward to your updates as you fill out towards that description 

But I do know a half white/half korean woman- who spent at least part of her childhood in Korea- who's quite large, easily 200+ at her peak while only being average height at most.

you know it, NFL mostly but while I was in England over the summer I started watching some rugby.

So you've seen how the average Polynesian player is way bigger than the average white player, and they frequently possess great speed for their size, suggesting that they're not overly bulky and are naturally big people.

[Y2kboris1]

I'm glad you took my advice. ;D

Quite so.

Here's an interesting article from the New York Times on black women and fat:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/why-black-women-are-fat.html

Wow, ya THAT article. Alice Randall what a wretch and a killjoy. As I've stated before elsewhere it's sad to see the same narrow minded thought process of some portions of our society infect others. I think weight gain has more to do with environmental factors than it does with genetics. If it were based mostly on genetics you would never see certain peoples of a given ethnic group or minority gain weight. It has much more to do with the culture, both collectively as well as how families behave as units. I know in our household all my family are German/Irish/Lithuanian by descent and they are all mostly overweight or fat, yet as a whole I don't think any one of those cultures are overweight as a general rule. In our household my Mom raised us thinking of food as comfort. Every special occasion was marked with the indulgence of some sort of special dish for a special occasion. It would seem to follow that we would all become fat, however over time I've remained relatively thin. I think it's equal parts genetic, environmental, and psychological, meaning whether or not someone has the will that they want to, or not want to be fat. I don't really think it's determinant from one culture to another. Put any ethnicity on an average American diet and I guarantee within about a generation at most you will see individuals who are just as overweight as the average American.

[OscarWinner]

I'm glad you took my advice. ;D

Quite so.

Here's an interesting article from the New York Times on black women and fat:

Black Women and Fat

By ALICE RANDALL

Published: May 5, 2012

FOUR out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.

What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

The black poet Lucille Clifton’s 1987 poem “Homage to My Hips” begins with the boast, “These hips are big hips.” She establishes big black hips as something a woman would want to have and a man would desire. She wasn’t the first or the only one to reflect this community knowledge. Twenty years before, in 1967, Joe Tex, a black Texan, dominated the radio airwaves across black America with a song he wrote and recorded, “Skinny Legs and All.” One of his lines haunts me to this day: “some man, somewhere who’ll take you baby, skinny legs and all.” For me, it still seems almost an impossibility.

Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not.

How many white girls in the ’60s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears.

How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.

But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.

Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me that her husband, also a tenured professor and of color, begged her not to lose “the sugar down below” when she embarked on a weight-loss program.

And it’s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It’s politics too. To get a quick introduction to the politics of black fat, I recommend Andrea Elizabeth Shaw’s provocative book “The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies.” Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black woman’s body “functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.” By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.

When the biologist Daniel Lieberman suggested in a public lecture at Harvard this past February that exercise for everyone should be mandated by law, the audience applauded, the Harvard Gazette reported. A room full of thin affluent people applauding the idea of forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise appalls me. Government mandated exercise is a vicious concept. But I get where Mr. Lieberman is coming from. The cost of too many people getting too fat is too high.

I live in Nashville. There is an ongoing rivalry between Nashville and Memphis. In black Nashville, we like to think of ourselves as the squeaky-clean brown town best known for our colleges and churches. In contrast, black Memphis is known for its music and bars and churches. We often tease the city up the road by saying that in Nashville we have a church on every corner and in Memphis they have a church and a liquor store on every corner. Only now the saying goes, there’s a church, a liquor store and a dialysis center on every corner in black Memphis.

The billions that we are spending to treat diabetes is money that we don’t have for education reform or retirement benefits, and what’s worse, it’s estimated that the total cost of America’s obesity epidemic could reach almost $1 trillion by 2030 if we keep on doing what we have been doing.

WE have to change. Black women especially. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks have 51 percent higher obesity rates than whites do. We’ve got to do better. I’ve weighed more than 200 pounds. Now I weigh less. It will always be a battle.

My goal is to be the last fat black woman in my family. For me that has meant swirling exercise into my family culture, of my own free will and volition. I have my own personal program: walk eight miles a week, sleep eight hours a night and drink eight glasses of water a day.

I call on every black woman for whom it is appropriate to commit to getting under 200 pounds or to losing the 10 percent of our body weight that often results in a 50 percent reduction in diabetes risk. Sleeping better may be key, as recent research suggests that lack of sleep is a little-acknowledged culprit in obesity. But it is not just sleep, exercise and healthy foods we need to solve this problem — we also need wisdom.

I expect obesity will be like alcoholism. People who know the problem intimately find their way out, then lead a few others. The few become millions.

Down here, that movement has begun. I hold Zumba classes in my dining room, have a treadmill in my kitchen and have organized yoga classes for women up to 300 pounds. And I’ve got a weighted exercise Hula-Hoop I call the black Cadillac. Our go-to family dinner is sliced cucumbers, salsa, spinach and scrambled egg whites with onions. Our go-to snack is peanut butter — no added sugar or salt — on a spoon. My quick breakfast is a roasted sweet potato, no butter, or Greek yogurt with six almonds.

That’s soul food, Nashville 2012.

I may never get small doing all of this. But I have made it much harder for the next generation, including my 24-year-old daughter, to get large.

Alice Randall is a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Ada’s Rules.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/why-black-women-are-fat.html

...And Black men will continue chasing chubby White women...

Anyway, I believe we also need to take muscle into account as that could vary across ethnic lines and it does make a difference in the overall composition of a person's body - yes, this is true even for fat people as they are not all blubber from skin to bone.

You could be 350 lbs but underneath your fat you could be DJ Qualls or Triple H...

I tend to find Black people to be quite muscular, as you can find a Sista who's a size 0 but looks surprisingly healthy and even buff, whereas with White chicks, no offense, may come across as haggard and flushed. Muscle has more mass than fat, so it throws off the BMI since it's based on weight

[Guest pockets]

I think that with more ethnic groups (for lack of a better term) have a tendency to place more emphasis on food, especially as immigrants, or minorities since it's such an important tie to culture.

[wilan]

I think that with more ethnic groups (for lack of a better term) have a tendency to place more emphasis on food, especially as immigrants, or minorities since it's such an important tie to culture.

Food may be "an important tie to culture", but without any evidence I'm not convinced by what you say.

[Really?]

A black man who grew up in the Chicago housing projects (colloquially: ghetto) gave me an elaborate dissertation recently on how for the poor marginalized folks cooking and food do become important cultural touchstones. The thrust of the thing was that the food they have access to is really shitty and so they become really good at cooking it and making it taste delicious. The cuisine then becomes a point of pride. This was true across all marginalized immigrant communities. Once the marginalized community is integrated into society at large the food looses a lot of its prior potency. Sure Italian food is still pretty good but most of the time Italians eat the same shit as everyone else. African American cuisine is a lot better in the poor marginalized communities than in the of case black people who are living in middle class America since they mostly eat the same shit as the rest of us.

The exception to this seems to be the Irish Americans who ate boiled garbage when they were poor and never broadened their horizons beyond the potato even after moving out of the ghettos as evidenced by the fact that I didn't eat a potatoless dinner until I was eighteen years old.

[vennie]

Cultural component number 1:

[Gary1627]

Has anyone here thought about redheads. For the life of me I can't think of any top class redheaded female athletes, yet there are plenty of BBW's that are redheaded. I'm sure someone on here can show me that there are female sports women that are redheaded. However, from just simple observation I've noticed that many redheads don't seem to be particularly toned.

[Guest Atlya]

Has anyone here thought about redheads. For the life of me I can't think of any top class redheaded female athletes, yet there are plenty of BBW's that are redheaded. I'm sure someone on here can show me that there are female sports women that are redheaded. However, from just simple observation I've noticed that many redheads don't seem to be particularly toned.

Red heads are pretty rare.

[davros]

A lot of people go down the "genetic determinism" route here, but the evidence there is only shows genetic links that influence weight on average by a few lbs. From what I've seen the most important factors (by a long shot) are how much you eat matched with how many calories you burn.

(BSc/Mphil Genetics/ Molecular Biology... which doesn't actually show a sufficient level of knowledge to confidently state either or is true, but merely adds weight to my having not heard significant evidence to the contrary).