Beyond genetic race: biocultural insights into the causes of racial health disparities

Summary This chapter highlights the dynamic and fundamentally intertwined intersection of local and global systems, ecological, economic, and epidemiological, in their analysis of diet, health, and nutrition in Mayan communities in the Yucatán Peninsula, Southern Mexico. It discusses four factors that limit the utility of the genetic race concept and its applicability to racial health disparities. The first is that human variation does not come packaged in types or races, but reflects complex histories of migration and gene flow between continents. Second, race membership is socially and culturally defined, and not based upon genetic criteria. Third, most common chronic diseases that contribute to health disparities are 'complex' traits that do not relate back to genes in a straightforward fashion. Lastly, there are two powerful ways by which environments and experiences shape health disparities within and between societies, reflecting how the human body responds to and comes to create a record of these experiences.