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ScienceDaily reports that:
In a population of initially well-functioning older adults, we found a significant correlation between strong adherence to the Mediterranean diet and a slower rate of cognitive decline among African American, but not white, older adults. Our study is the first to show a possible race-specific association between the Mediterranean diet and cognitive decline.
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Mediterranean Diet has Varied Effects on Cognitive Decline among Different Races
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(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @11:30AM
Even your passive agressive character is more a result of your culture rather than of you being an inbred hick. Those extra fingers are genetic I'm afraid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @01:40PM
Lol....troll.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday July 20 2014, @07:34PM
This thread is racist and this whole discussion and submission are racist.
Race is only a social construct.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday July 20 2014, @08:10PM
Sorry, but it's not *only* a social construct, it's also a surrogate observable for a multitude of non-observable characteristics. It's not a particularly reliable surrogate, but it's one that easy to observe. Very few people could offer their geneotype to a study like this, and fewer would be willing to do so. (Even then you need to test fro epigenetic markers to complete the physical outline.) And, of course, culture is often divided along readily observable cleavage planes, and for that purpose race is used.
How about this one: Were use heavily exposed to DDT before you were 13? That's a known agent that affects epigenetic markers. How important isn't certain. It seems to lead to various physical problems. But the kicker is: Were your parents heavily exposed to DDT before or during their early teens? It's a partially inheritable change. Epigenetic changes aren't totally cleaned away between generations. They decay over generations, but there is still argument going on over how rapidly, and whether they all decay at the same rate and .... In rats some epigenetic changes seem to heal over around 5 generations. The particular change (a kink in the tail) didn't seem to confer any advantage under any circumstances. If I recall the test correctly it was imposed via a starvation diet. (See also studies about human families from the Netherlands during WWII. Also something about some place in scandanavia that I can't place at the moment.)
Now it's quite probable that families with black skin have experienced various environmental insults that families with other skin colors were spared. This could easily have caused epigenetic changes, though to my knowledge no studies have been done. (I'm *NOT* an expert in this area.)
But because of the preceeding arguments, race is not solely a social construct.
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