By Dra Adriana Cortés
The US has brought us latinos a huge range of opportunities to improve our quality of lifestyle… except in our health. Unfortunately, there is an immense noise of nutrition in this golden land that has confused all the living human beings living here, including us, the latinos.
For us in Bien Plantado is very sad to watch how slowly our traditional ways get a bit lost and as latinos we end up eating in ways that are 1) not natural to us and 2) very far away from what we were taught back at our countries of origin.
All this produces results in our health, and not very good ones. A study made by the National Alliance for Hispanic Health in more than 16,000 Hispanics living in the US in four centers (Bronx, NY, Chicago, IL, Miami, FL and San Diego, CA) revealed that almost half of men aged 45 to 65 years old had a high risk of developing diabetes, a greater proportion of women mentioned they had asthma and described symptoms of depression. Many women did not know they had diabetes and did not receive treatment or controlled their high blood pressure. At least half of all surveyed people did not eat 5 or more portions of fruits and vegetables.
Research has shown that latinos get lesser quality health care, experience worse health outcomes, and have higher rates of certain diseases. What is worst for our future, latino children have the higher obesity rate in the US, with almost 2 per 5 Hispanic children aged 2 to 19 years old being overweight or obese; and half of the children born in 2000 have risk of developing diabetes. In adults, the main causes of death are cancer (20,5%) and cardiovascular diseases (19.8%). Around 46% of latino adult men older than 20 years old have high blood pressure, 20.8% have diabetes (physician-diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes) and an overwhelming 82 % of the adult population are overweight o obese (2015 – 2018), that is 36.2% are overweight and 45.8% are obese.
If you as a reader did not know this, I must assure you: all above diseases can totally be totally prevented and mostly reverted by adopting a truly healthy lifestyle which includes the optimal diet for human health.
In addition, 23% of the Hispanic population are uninsured in comparison to 9% of their white counterparts. Twenty two percent had delayed needed care due to cost in comparison to 13% of the white population.
Considering these statistics knowing that it is projected that the latino population will be more than 25% of the population living in the US by 2045, we believe it is greatly important to provide effective and clear health education about the optimal diet for human health.
