Perception of Obesity in African-American and Arab-American Minority Groups.

Background: Effectiveness of health education programs and interventions, designed to improve obesity rates, may vary according to perceptions of health within cultural groups.

Method: A qualitative approach was used. Two minority cultural groups (Arab-American and African-American) living in the same county were studied to compare perceptions of health, nutrition, and obesity and subsequent health behaviors.

Results: Control, expectations, bias, acceptance, and access were the five themes identified. Arab-Americans that had lower weights, lower prevalence of chronic diseases, expected healthy weights, reported age and gender bias related to being overweight were not as accepting of being overweight and did not report difficulties in accessing healthy food choices compared to their African-American counterparts.

Conclusions: Health interventions aimed at reducing obesity rates and related chronic diseases should be culturally specific and aimed at changing expected and accepted cultural norms. Cultural group's void of certain disease states should be studied and used as models to ameliorate the problem in other cultures. Changing health behaviors within a certain cultural group may produce better outcomes when initiated from a member of that same group. The impact of economic and environmental factors on health behaviors must also be considered.