Moving to a Better Neighborhood Can Be as Effective as Drugs in Preventing Obesity and Diabetes

[MountainLaurel]

Researchers have long suspected that living in a bad neighborhood can be hazardous to your health—whether because of poor access to health care and a paucity of areas to exercise in and stores that sell healthy food, or some combination of other factors, living in a poor area means you have a disproportionate chance of becoming ill and obese. But how can you tell whether that effect is intrinsic to poverty, or whether it can be reversed if people move into more well-off neighborhoods? With a giant, long-term study that gives families in poor neighborhoods a chance to move to other areas.

The results of such a study, conducted by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, have now been published, and they show that moving from low-income housing projects to a neighborhood with less than 10% of people living below the poverty line does have a positive effect on health. Measuring rates of obesity and of diabetes markers in the blood, they saw that people who had moved to low-poverty areas had significantly lower levels of both. “These are pretty big effects,” Jens Ludwig, the lead researcher, told ScienceNOW, “comparable in size to the long-term effects on diabetes we see from targeted lifestyle interventions or from providing people with medication that can prevent the onset of diabetes.” But why this is happening is still not clear, ScienceNOW reports:

"The experiment clearly shows that the neighborhood effect is real, says Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston who studies the effect of social ties on health, but the mechanisms remain murky. Is it the shops and restaurants, the parks and pools, he wonders, “or the people in a neighborhood that affect you most?” For example, Christakis says, the people who moved might have lost weight because safer streets and open spaces “allowed them to walk outside more, or because they saw thinner people around them, or both.”"

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/10/25/moving-to-a-better-neighborhood-can-be-as-effective-as-drugs-in-preventing-obesity-and-diabetes-study-suggests/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+80beats+%2880beats%29

[MADem]

1. If the place is a shooting gallery, you're not likely to want to take Spot for an after-dinner walk

around the block, or down to the park, now, are you?

Makes sense to me.

[jwirr]

2. Define bad neighborhood? If the people are poor I could have told

you why they are often obese. We ate a lot of pasta because it was cheap. When you have less money to spend on food you buy things that can go farther in casseroles, etc. And yes if you know what you are doing it is possible to eat healthy even when poor but that also depends on if you have access to good grocery stores, etc.

[MountainLaurel]

3. In this study

These used public housing as their definition.

[jwirr]

4. I suspect it would be the same.

[reggie the dog]

5. I am poor and eat a shitload of pasta and potatos

and i am not fat, i just work out by riding a bicycle. i am poor in the countryside now but was poor in the city of paris (lived in the ghetto in the 19th district for a year) and i still rode my bike all the time and stayed in shape.

[unblock]

7. some people (myself included) eat way more than many obese people

and never exercise and yet don't gain weight.

i've never weighed more than the high side of "normal" on the bmi scale, even when i was eating a supersized large double cheeseburger combo and an entire box of mac & cheese & a coke every day. dieters hate me, of course, though it has its downside as well; 95-pound weaklings don't do well socially in college....

this is one reason why i think gut bacteria plays a role. i suspect that a lot of what i'm eating goes to feed my gut bacteria instead of actually feeding me, whereas every calorie mrs. unblock eats shows up on the scale.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

8. Hypothyroidism is the cause of a lot of obesity.

And other glandular/metabolic problems: diabetes, adrenal exhaustion and others.

Has she had her thyroid checked? Many doctors don't know how to treat hypothyroidism adequately. They ignore it and give people antidepressants.

[unblock]

9. as a matter of fact,

yes, she does have hypothyroidism and now takes synthroid daily.

she's also lost quite a lot of weight over the last year.

hmmmmm.

[unblock]

6. they don't spell it out, but they're implying that they control for poverty

they seem to be comparing people at the same income level but who live in different neighborhood.

so if the motivation to save money on food is the same in either case, but ACCESS to cheap or better food would be different, and what the grocer puts on display is different, and what you see everyone else buying is different.

there also might be fewer mcdonald's nearby, etc.



i personally suspect that there's a viral or bacterial component to obesity and that it's probably contagious. i have no direct evidence of this, of course, but the epidemiology suggests to me that it's not just a behavioral disease. perhaps the harmful/beneficial bacteria in our gut play a bigger role than we know.