Another angle on obesity.  I just got back from interviewing Marian Neuhouser, a nutritional scientist at the Fred Hutchinson center.  She’s launching a new study of Mexican-American women.  She says more than 76% of Hispanic women in the U.S. are overweight or obese (the overall rate for women in the U.S. is 64%).  The experience of Mexican immigrants is similar to Japanese immigrants – within one generation in this country, the rates of obesity skyrocket.  That’s why many scientists say there’s something about living in modern America that is “obesogenic” – causing people to become obese.  The most likely and most important factor: diet.

Neuhouser’s hypothesis is that the switch in diet is a trigger, going from typical rural Mexican meals dominated by beans, rice and fresh-made tortillas, to a more American diet that’s full of processed foods, white flour, fatty meats, and sugary drinks.  But, she also suspects the problem for Mexican immigrants is exacerbated by their genetic profile and how it reacts to the American foods.

She just received funding to study this in detail, by getting 50 Seattle-area Mexican women to eat their meals at the Hutch for a month, so she can control their diet, while monitoring their blood for a number of biomarkers.

The biomarkers might also help explain why Hispanic women tend to get a more virulent, hard-to-treat form of breast cancer.