Adjusting to culture a heavy duty

CHICAGO – Long-term exposure to American culture may be hazardous to immigrants’ health.

A new study found that obesity is relatively rare in the foreign-born until they have lived in the United States – the land of drive-thrus, remote controls and double cheeseburgers – for more than 10 years.

Only 8 percent of immigrants who had lived in the United States for less than a year were obese, but that jumped to 19 percent among those who had been here for at least 15 years. That compared with 22 percent of U.S.-born residents surveyed.

The study, published in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association, shows the flip side of the American dream of finding a better life in the land of plenty. “Part of the American dream and sort of life of leisure is that you also have some of the negative effects, and obesity is one of the major side effects of the success of technology and just having a life of leisure,” said co-author Dr. Christina Wee of Harvard Medical School.

Previous studies have shown that immigrants tend to have healthier habits, including less smoking and drug use, than U.S.-born residents, and longer life spans. Researchers suspect that is at least partly because those who choose to immigrate could be unusually healthy, since uprooting to another country requires strength and vitality. But the earlier studies did not look at how obesity rates among immigrants changed over time.

The link between obesity and numbers of years in the United States was found in white, Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups. It was not seen in foreign-born blacks, but their numbers in the study were too small to draw any conclusions, said lead author Dr. Mita Sanghavi Goel of Northwestern University in Chicago.

The study involved data on 32,374 participants in a 2000 national health survey, 14 percent of whom were immigrants.