http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/351727.html

Latina and Asian American women live the longest

Maria Guzman, who celebrated her 82nd birthday last week with about 40 relatives, is preparing for her next cruise -- to the Greek islands.

Guzman, who lives by herself in Elk Grove when she's not touring the world, is one of the unsung heroines of a new study showing that Latinas and Asian American women live longer than anyone else in California.

The state's 6.5 million Latinas enjoy an average life expectancy of 83, while the nearly 2.3 million Asian American females can expect to live past 85, according to the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California.

Guzman, who loves to go to Europe and the Holy Land, attributes her healthy life to "no bad habits such as drinking or smoking and ... a lot of home-cooked meals."

She says she sticks to chicken, fish and vegetables, "and beans and tortillas are my favorite food."

Guzman, who was born in the town of San Juan De Los Lagos in Jalisco, Mexico, married at 17 and had 14 children. "We emigrated in 1966, when she was 40," said daughter Alicia Guzman-Folster.

California's women live longer than men -- an average of 80.7 years compared with 75.9, with white women seeing 80.1 years and African American women 75. Asian American and Latino men live longer (80.4 and 77.5, respectively) than white men (75.5 years) and black men (68.6), according to the study released Wednesday.

Asian women and Latinas -- especially immigrants -- have very low lung cancer death rates in particular, while African American males have very high lung cancer rates, said Dr. Bruce Leistikow, professor of public health sciences at UC Davis.

Aside from low smoke exposure, immigrants may tend to live longer because only healthy people can make it to the United States, said Leistikow.

Helen Lee, who co-authored the study, agreed that survival of the fittest may come in to play among immigrants.

Lee said that the better educated you are, the longer you tend to live, and that less-educated groups tend to smoke more, are more prone to obesity and often get less access to health care.

Asian American women smoke less, are less overweight and drink less than any other ethnic group, Lee said.

Latinas also smoke and drink less than other groups, though they're twice as likely to be obese as white women, the study showed.

Dr. Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, a Mexican immigrant who's director of the Center for Reducing Health Disparities at UC Davis, wasn't surprised by the results, given the high percentage of immigrants among Latinos and Asian Americans.

About a third of California's 12 million Latinos are immigrants, and "it appears that immigrants tend to have better health than the second and third generations," Aguilar-Gaxiola said.

He calls it the "Latino paradox -- in spite of being poorer in general, and with less education and fewer regular medical visits, Latinas tend to have better mortality rates than other groups. For example, Mexican women who immigrate to California tend to have good pregnancy outcomes in spite of the lack of prenatal care," Aguilar-Gaxiola said.

"Poverty doesn't necessarily coincide with unhealthy lifestyles," he said. "There are cultural values and protective health behaviors that exist in immigrant Latinos. The first generation tends to have better marriages, the families stay more intact. They tend to respect their elders; they don't place their parents in a home; they take care of their own."

The same holds true for many Asian Americans, Aguilar-Gaxiola said.

What's troubling, Lee said, is that African Americans haven't closed the mortality gap with other ethnic groups. She said the average African American man in California can't expect to live as long as the average North Korean.

"Black men in California are 10 times more likely to to die from homicide than white men," Lee said. "Homicide is very correlated with living in racially segregated communities with a high poverty level and little opportunity for educational and economic mobility."

Some other key findings:

• Latino men and women are twice as likely to die from diabetes as whites, and black women are three times more likely to die of diabetes than white women.

• Death rates from heart disease are about 50 percent higher for black women and 40 percent higher for black men than they are for whites.

• Asian men have slightly higher death rates from stroke and stomach cancer.

• Whites are more likely than other groups to die of Alzheimer's disease and suicide.