The Mexican paradox is the observation that the Mexican people

Demographics of Mexico

With a population 112,336,538 in 2010, Mexico is the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world, the second-most populous country in Latin America after Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and the second in North America, after the United States. Throughout most of the twentieth century Mexico's...

 exhibit a surprisingly low incidence of low birth mass, contrary to what would be expected from their socioeconomic status

Socioeconomic status

Socioeconomic status is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person's work experience and of an individual's or family’s economic and social position in relation to others, based on income, education, and occupation...

 (SES). This appears as an outlier

Outlier

In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Grubbs defined an outlier as: An outlying observation, or outlier, is one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs....

 in graphs correlating SES with low-birth-weight rates.

It has been proposed that resistance to changes in diet

Diet (nutrition)

In nutrition, diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat. With the word diet, it is often implied the use of specific intake of nutrition for health or weight-management...

 are responsible for the positive birth weight association for Mexican-American mothers.

Nevertheless, the medical causes of lower rates of low birth weight

Low birth weight

Low birth weight is defined as a birth weight of a liveborn infant of less than 2,500 g. regardless of gestational age-Causes:LBW is either the result of preterm birth or of the infant being small for gestational age , or a combination of...

s (LBW) among birthing Mexican mothers has been called into question.

The results of the study showed that the mean birth weight of Mexican-American babies was 3.34 kg (7.37 lbs), while that of non-Hispanic White

White Hispanic and Latino Americans

White Hispanic and Latino Americans are citizens and residents of the United States who are racially White and ethnically Hispanic or Latino.White American, itself an official U.S...

 babies was 3.39 kg (7.48 lbs.). This finding re-emphasized the independence of mean birth weight and LBW. This however did not refute the discrepancies in LBW for Mexicans.

The study also showed that the overall preterm birth rate was higher among Mexican Americans (10.6%) than non-Hispanic Whites (9.3%).

The overall hypothesis of the authors was that this finding reflected an error in recorded gestational age

Gestational age

Gestational age relates to the age of an embryo or fetus . There is some ambiguity in how it is defined:*In embryology, gestational age is the time elapsed since conception. This interval is also termed fertilisation age....

, described in a strongly bimodal birth-weight distribution at young gestational ages for Mexican-Americans.

See also

• French paradox
  French paradox
  The French Paradox is the observation that French people suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, despite having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats...
  
  
• List of paradoxes
• Low birth weight paradox
  Low birth weight paradox
  The low birth weight paradox is an apparently paradoxical observation relating to the birth weights and mortality of children born to tobacco smoking mothers. Low birth weight children born to smoking mothers have a lower infant mortality rate than the low birth weight children of non-smokers...
  
  , concerning infant mortality rates for smoking mothers