Wednesday 2nd May, 2018
In this week’s episode we have a really interesting and insightful conversation with Le’Nise Brothers, the founder of Eat Love Move, about fibroids, hormones, diet and lifestyle.
The black community has a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes and this increased risk was thought to be due to a combination of factors with genetics playing a significant role.
In a study recently published in JAMA it has been shown that there is no genetic reason linking black people to an increased risk of diabetes. The increase in risk is due to lifestyle factors like obesity.
This study looked at 4,251 black and white men and women, aged 18 to 30 without diabetes. Forty-nine per cent were black (2,066 participants) and 54% were women (2,304 participants). Participants were followed for an average of 25 years and over time 504 cases of diabetes were identified – 189 white participants and 315 black partcipants developed type 2 diabetes.
The study found that overall black men and women were more likely to develop diabetes but when they took into account factors like biology, neighbourhood, psycho-social, socioeconomic and behavioural, both black and white people had the same risk of developing type 2 diabetes. If there was an underlying genetic reason then when all those factors were taken into account then there would have still been an increased risk seen in black men and women.
When exploring what specific factors increased black people’s risk of type 2 diabetes they found that factors that were modifiable were the main culprits – body weight, waist size, blood sugar level, blood pressure and others.
Researcher Prof Mercedes Carnethon said:
“Obesity is driving these differences. The findings surprised us, because for the past 20 years there was a narrative that there must be something we haven’t found that was causing this higher rate. Blacks gained more weight over time. It was the accumulation of this and other risk factors that eliminated the so-called mysterious cause of the disparity.”
The findings for this study are empowering, in a way, as it means that clear steps can be taken to reduce the high risk seen in the black community by promoting a healthy lifestyle with lead study author Michael Bancks stating:
“To eliminate the higher rate of diabetes, everybody needs to have access to healthy foods, safe spaces for physical activity and equal economic opportunity to have enough money to afford these things and live in communities that offer this.”
The focus now has to be on ensuring that more black people live a healthy lifestyle so that health inequalities like this can be addressed. This means delving into the social and economic inequalities which may act as barriers to living a healthy lifestyle.
The Healthy Caribbean Coalition in collaboration with the NCD Alliance have released an action plan for preventing childhood obesity in the Caribbean. This action plan is based on a number of frameworks developed by organisations around the world to ensure consistency. The plan aims to foster a collaborative approach to tackling childhood obesity with recommendations for civil society working in partnership with governments and the private sector.
This action plan is of utmost importance as a third of children in the Caribbean are overweight or obese. Children who are overweight or obese are at an increased risk of being overweight or obese adults and of developing a non-communicable disease (NCD) later in life.
Rates of childhood obesity are increasing in the Caribbean; this needs to be addressed to improve the health of the Caribbean community. If left unchecked the Caribbean will see a huge increase in NCDs leading to avoidable ill-health and premature death. The Healthy Caribbean Coalition’s action plan aims to address this. Their plan focuses on seven priority areas. These include:
Trade and fiscal policies e.g. taxation of unhealthy food
Nutrition literacy e.g. mandatory front-of-package nutrition labelling
Early childhood nutrition e.g. interventions related to breastfeeding and complementary foods
Marketing of healthy and unhealthy foods and drinks e.g. banning of marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks to children
School and community based interventions e.g. mandatory physical activity in schools
Resource mobilisation for interventions addressing childhood obesity
Strategic planning, monitoring and evaluation: e.g monitoring progress through the use of the CSO Childhood Obesity Prevention Scorecard
The Healthy Caribbean Coalition team, based in Barbados, will take the lead on implementing this action plan and will form a regional Steering Committee with members coming from the around the Caribbean representing the private sector, government and civil society organisations. They will also form a civil society organisation action network for childhood obesity prevention who will work on promoting relevant policies and interventions.
We’re really happy to see this action plan published. It provides a good foundation on which to start work on the prevention of childhood obesity in the Caribbean and we look forward to getting involved in this work.
For more information please visit the HCC website here, download the action plan below or email hcc@healthycaribbean.org
