Nobody has to be convinced that obesity is a problem — doctors have made it clear that excess weight leads to a host of health risks, and even raises the chance of early death compared to normal-weighted individuals.
race
Passing as Black: How Biracial Americans Choose Identity
The practice of passing — identifying with and presenting oneself as one race while denying ancestry of another — reached its peak during the Jim Crow era. Needless to say, the notion of having to “pass” as white is outdated …
Who’s White? Who’s Black? Who Knows?
Never mind what you’ve heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President; …
Low Vitamin D and Stroke Risk: Unrelated in African Americans
In a finding that surprised its authors, a new study revealed that vitamin D deficiency does not contribute to rates of fatal stroke in African Americans, even while it doubles the risk of death from stroke in whites. This, …
Why Obesity May Not Raise Breast Cancer Risk in Mexican Americans
For a disease as complex as breast cancer, pinpointing its risk factors, genetic or otherwise, is challenging enough. But an intriguing new study suggests that the task may be even harder when ethnicity is thrown into the mix.
CommittedInfertility
Lawsuit over Children Born the Wrong Color After IVF
A Northern Irish High Court judge has declined to award damages to a family who sued a health trust that provided in vitro fertilization (IVF) services for using the wrong sperm and causing their two children to be born darker …
The Hispanic Mortality Paradox: Why Do Latinos Outlive Other Americans?
For the first time, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has collected national life expectancy data for the Hispanic population, and backed up the surprising findings of past studies: the average life expectancy of a …
Why Do Black Patients Get Unwanted End-of-Life Care?
Many patients with terminal cancer get life-prolonging end-of-life treatment they did not ask for, often due to lack of clear communication with doctors and, disproportionately, those patients are African American.
Why White Girls Are Getting More Weight Loss Surgery
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the rate of weight loss surgery in the U.S., including lap band and gastric bypass, went up by 700% between 2005 and 2007. But we already knew that the …
The politics of perceiving skin color
Whether or not you agree with Barack Obama’s politics may influence how dark- or light-skinned you think he is, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, which set out to determine whether political views can skew skin color perception, included three experiments. In all three,
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