South American Indigenous Communities And Body Mass Index: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis

Obesity is an increasing new pandemic. Currently more than 1.9 billion adults are overweight and at least 700 million of them are obese. Obesity is the result of a positive energy balance, which is conditioned by both environmental and genetic factors. Interestingly, individuals from similar ethnic-based ancestry communities, share both environmental and genetic features. Here, we described the relationship between indigenous Chilean groups and body mass Index. We conducted a Systematic review and Meta-analysis on Pubmed, LILACS, Scielo, Web of Science and Scopus databases. Our results showed that Indigenous Children present a lower BMI than Non-Indigenous Children. However, no difference within BMI was identified in adults. The gender affected the BMI as well. Aymara and Mapuche Women presented higher BMI than Indigenous Men. In the other hand, Indigenous people living in rural environment showed lower BMI than those whose live-in urban areas. Finally, Indigenous communities presented no difference in the risk to suffer Obesity when compared with Non-Indigenous communities. Here suggest that ethnicity could be a health determinant as well as a risk factor for obesity. Then, targeted prevention strategies with ethnic-based focus would be developed.