In a dispiriting finding for African yank women and ladies, a replacement study finds that whereas partaking in high levels of physical activity may be a smart bet for preventing blubber in white adolescent women, it doesn't offer their black peers constant profit.
For white girls, by contrast, regular exercise at 12 appeared a
nearly sure way to head off obesity at 14. That finding held, even when
the calorie intakes of an African American youngster and her white
counterpart were the same.
The authors, a pair of British
researchers using data from a government health study that followed
American adolescents for several years, said their findings pointed to a
significant metabolic disadvantage for African American girls hoping to
maintain a healthy weight. They concluded that "obesity-prevention
interventions may need to be adapted to account for the finding that
black girls are less sensitive to the effects of physical activity" than
their white sisters.
In the national effort to stem a crisis of
obesity in the United States, the state of African American women stands
out as a particular challenge. At 39.4%, their rate of obesity is the
highest of any single ethnic or gender group measured. Four in five
black women are overweight or obese when measured by the most widely
accepted gauge of fatness, the body mass index, or BMI.
The run-up
in weight probably begins in adolescence, experts say, which is why
many efforts to address the epidemic of obesity and its related diseases
in African American women are heavily focused on girls. First
LadyMichelle Obama's"Let's Move" campaign, for example, has focused
intensively on getting African Americans girls and adolescents to become
more active.
The new finding "makes our life more challenging,"
said Ginny Ehrlich, chief executive of the Alliance for a Healthier
Generation, which works in more than 14,000 U.S. schools to encourage
exercise and healthier eating. It underscores the need to stress the
fundamental skill of balancing energy intake and output.
"It's not just physical activity," Ehrlich said. "That's particularly important for African American girls."
The
study, which draws from a database of 1,148 adolescents, is the first
to explore differences between white and black girls' physical activity
rates and their effect on weight. (Just under half — 538 — identified
themselves as African American.) But it falls in line with research that
finds black women oxidize fat more slowly in response to exercise, and
that their resting metabolic rates are lower than those of white women.
Such racial variations "may incline black women to retentive fat accumulated throughout time of life," wrote the authors, James White of Cardiff University and Russell Jago of the University of Bristol. "Our results counsel that prompting adolescent women to move could also be vital to preventing blubber however that exploitation totally different approaches (e.g. accenting reductions in energy intake) could also be necessary to forestall blubber in black women."
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