Stop Making Sense

The Hispanic Paradox

So there I was, minding my own business reading the day's news when I stumbled upon an article on a subject I'd never encountered before - something called the Hispanic Paradox. Having nothing more pressing to do than drinking another cup of coffee, I dove in. And now I will regale you with all I learned. Well, not all - I'll summarize while trying to maintain some degree of comprehension. Also, I want to relate this paradox to some other interesting data I recently stumbled upon (I've been doing a lot of stumbling lately) regarding life expectancy in Mexico.

The Hispanic Paradox

In a nutshell, the Hispanic Paradox goes like this: Hispanic Americans on average live longer than white Americans, despite having larger rates of diabetes and obesity, lower income, and less access to healthcare. Researchers in the U.S. first noted this phenomenon in the mid 1980s, and since then other researchers (many of them of Hispanic origin themselves) have struggled to account for this paradox. The biggest determining factor in health and well-being across the globe is wealth: wealthy nations and citizens tend to be in better health and to live longer than their less wealthy counterparts. This makes sense: wealth implies access to more and better healthcare, and better education about how to care for oneself.

Why, then, do Hispanics in the U.S. live longer than white people in the U.S.? First, let's get this out of the way: there has been so much study of this paradox that your concerns about statistical bias can largely be set aside. Biases such as the "salmon bias" (which states that many Hispanic immigrants return to their home countries before dying), healthy migrant effect (which states that migrants tend to be healthier than the average for their home population), and age biases (the Hispanic population in the U.S. has a younger average age than the white population) have all been taken into account and corrected for. And still the paradox holds: Hispanic people in the U.S. on average live 2 years longer than white people.

Possible Explanations

One early and popular explanation put forward was diet: namely, that legumes - which are an important component of many Hispanic diets - have an anti-inflammation effect that may account for the longevity. But at the same time, the diets of immigrants coming to the U.S. typically worsen measurably during their life in the U.S. (people in the U.S. have relatively poor diets - not a lack of food, but a lack of quality food). In the end, diet was pretty much ruled out as a contributing factor.

In the 2010s, a researcher named John Ruiz - now a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona - put forth the idea that the tight communal and familial networks within Hispanic populations may provide the best explanation for the paradox. Families living together are obviously better positioned to help one another financially and to handle unexpected costs from medical bills. And they can watch out and care for one another when health issues arise. That Hispanic communities tend to have a deep and shared sense of spirituality may also demonstrate that the optimism that comes from faith is a contributing factor as well.

The two longest living ethnic groups in the U.S. - Hispanics and Asians - both live in these types of collective cultures. The evidence is strong that cultural values provide the best explanation for this paradox.

Shortcomings of the Hispanic Paradox

The major problem - and the one that many researchers are focusing on - is that the paradox is defined in terms of the entire Hispanic population in the U.S., regardless of origins. This makes it difficult to determine if the paradox holds as true, say, for populations from the Dominican Republic or Cuba as it does for populations from Mexico or Puerto Rico. Many researchers - especially researchers within specific Hispanic communities - are analyzing how true the paradox holds for each individual community. The "Hispanic" in Hispanic Paradox is itself a generalization that needs to be understood within the contexts of the many unique cultures that make up the "Hispanic" diaspora.

Beyond Local

The Hispanic paradox derived initially from observations and research in the United States. However, evidence suggests that the paradox extends beyond the U.S. and into the rest of the world as well, including Latin America itself. Better health outcomes and longer lives are being observed within Latin American countries, which again is at odds with the traditional observations and expectations that wealthier countries experience the best health and longevity. In 2019 according to WHO data, the average life expectancy in Mexico was only 2 years less than that of the U.S. And in the U.S. the average life expectancy had gone down slightly between 2015 and 2019, while Mexico's rose slightly. Given the enormous wealth disparity between the U.S. and Mexico, this life expectancy data makes no sense in traditional terms. The conclusions contradict conventional wisdom, and point to two things: there is a real health and longevity advantage to living in a more communal society, and there is a distinct disadvantage - in terms of health and longevity - to the traditional "American" way of life in the U.S.

Continuing on

In my next article, I will take a subjective look at life in the U.S. vs life in Mexico that will relate to the unconventional outcomes that we are seeing longevity-wise in Hispanic societies (specifically, Mexico). I will look at cultural phenomena in the U.S. and how that phenomena is pushing the U.S. in an unhealthy direction: exacerbating the demise of community in the U.S. and creating a generation of people who lack a moral compass; and I'll contrast that with Mexican society whose educational and spiritual institutions help to create a shared sense of morality and a population that - while not always agreeing politically - still retains the good sense to not let that spill over into daily personal interactions.