ABSTRACT
Diversification of race and ethnicity in the United States continues to evolve and it is now projected that by 2050 non-Latino Caucasians will no longer be the majority [1]. These estimates show that the fastest migration rates will arise from Latino and Asian countries but Latinos will compose the largest racial and ethnic group [1]. Due to this racial and ethnic population shift, any existing health disparities are of increasing concern in public health and medicine. As a prime example, the rates of obesity in US children, adolescents, and adults are more pronounced in racial and ethnic groups such as Blacks and Latinos [2,3]. The risk of obesity and metabolic disease is also increasing in the Asian population, which has gone unnoticed due to the misclassification of obesity using the current body mass index (BMI) cutoffs [4]. The projected population increase in each of these racial and ethnic groups, coupled with current pediatric obesity rates in the United States, has severe implications for adult health disparity burdens including obesity and overt cardiometabolic disease.
