Journal Club: Racism and Health
Hi Byte Wellness Family!
This month, in our Healing Membership, we’re going ALL in on wellness resilience. For Black folx, that boils down to anti-inflammatory living (eating, activity, rest and stress management).
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We spent the first week of Black History Month texting our Healing Members wellness lessons that explained the connection between racism and the higher rates of early disability/death and chronic disease that Black Americans experience at every level of income and education (compared to our White counterparts). Here’s what relatively new research teaches us:
Exposure to interpersonal and structural racism causes chronic inflammation, which leads to otherwise preventable chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure (hypertension), heart attack and stroke.
Here’s the pathway in a nutshell:
Racism—> Chronic Inflammation—> Chronic Disease, Early Disability & Death
Watch the video above for a discussion of the groundbreaking study by Ronald Simons, et al.
If you’d like to dig deeper, check out the Theory of Social Genomics. It provides a fascinating explanation of how chronic social adversity (like racism) hijacks one of our evolutionarily conserved process to create chronic inflammation.
References:
👉🏾 The Journal Article We Discussed: Racism, Simons RL, Lei MK, Beach SRH, Barr AB, Simons LG, Gibbons FX, et al. Discrimination, segregation, and chronic inflammation: testing the weathering explanation for the poor health of Black Americans. Dev Psychol. 2018;54:1993–2006. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30234347/
👉🏾Higher Inflammatory Markers in Black Americans: Paalani M, Lee JW, Haddad E, Tonstad S. Determinants of inflammatory markers in a bi-ethnic population. Ethn Dis. 2011 Spring;21(2):142-9. PMID: 21749016; PMCID: PMC3427005. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3427005/
👉🏾Find More racism and health references on the Byte Wellness website: https://www.bytewellness.com/blog/references-healing-from-racism