Does obesity explain excess prevalence of diabetes among Mexican Americans?
Obesity and Type 2 (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes mellitus are common in the Mexican American population. It is not clear whether this is merely a specific instance of the more general phenomenon of excess Type 2 diabetes and obesity among poor people, or whether Mexican Americans have a discrete genetic susceptibility to Type 2 diabetes. The latter consideration arises because Mexican Americans are of mixed native American and European ancestry and native Americans may have a genetic predisposition to Type 2 diabetes which Mexican Americans could share. We studied 936 Mexican Americans and 398 Anglo-Americans randomly selected from three socially and culturally distinct neighborhoods in San Antonio, Texas. Three categories of obesity–lean, average, and obese–were defined using the Anglo-American distribution of the sum of the triceps and subscapular skinfold. Mexican Americans were two to four times as likely to fall into the obese category as Anglo-Americans, but within categorie
