Constance Hilliard

Background

About Constance Hilliard

UPDATE: My work in applied history has been meaningful beyond measure. It has begun to throw light on issues that have for decades confounded researchers in public health and epidemiology. Why for instance do a disproportionate number of African-Americans suffer from salt-sensitive high blood pressure and die each year of kidney failure? Their ancestors came from one of the most sodium-deficient regions of the world. Let's look at another issue that has puzzled the medical researchers. Blacks drink minimal amounts of milk on account of lactose intolerance and are by FDA standards calcium-deficient, but have the strongest bones and lowest rates of osteoporosis of any ethnicity in America. People of Northern European ancestry may require dairy calcium in their diets. But this ethnicity has falsely presumed itself to represent a universal standard. The biological parameters of their mineral requirements does not apply to all other population groups on the globe. African-Americans process calcium more efficiently and thus need less of it. The clinical studies showing that black adolescents build stronger bones without the need for dairy calcium have been straight forward. So why have their findings been so hard to grasp? It may require a paradigm shift. That is, all biological values may need to be recalibrated. Genetic adaptation is all around us. The notion of three races has been proved to be hogwash. There are thousands of population groups on this planet, who have adapted to water-deficient desert environments, low-mineral regions, oxygen-poor high altitudes, coastal high-sodium environments, tsetse-fly infested non-dairy farming territories, and the list goes on. So what does this mean? We create health disparities, sometimes serious ones, when we insist that there is a one-size-fits-all biological standard, which just so happens to be based on the biology of Northern Europeans. I will be working hard to change that paradigm, based on my own research.