A growing number of studies imply a link between a neighborhood’s physical environment and the chance of residents developing chronic conditions like heart disease, type 2 diabetes (T2D), and certain malignancies.
According to a new countrywide study headed by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine and published today in JAMA Network Open, living in neighborhoods with more fast-food outlets is linked to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes later in life across all regions of the United States.
Fast-Food Restaurants Are Related To A Higher Prevalence Of Diabetes
T2D is a type that is a result of a wrong lifestyle, particularly diet. People love to go for fast food but most of them do not digest easily as they have elements that take time for digesting.
This leads to additional fat in the body which turns into fat cells and hence one has to face obesity. Again obesity leads to many other diseases and one of them is diabetes type 2. Hence the epicenter of the whole chain is the fast-food restaurants that serve such products to users.
More supermarkets, particularly in suburban and rural areas, may stay protected against the development of T2D, according to the findings.
The study, which is unique for its geographic scope, draws on data from a cohort of more than 4 million veterans who live in 98 percent of U.S. census tracts.
Fast-food restaurants and supermarkets were counted in relation to other food outlets, and the study is the first to look at this link at the hyperlocal level in four different types of communities (high-density urban, low-density urban, suburban, and rural), according to the researchers.
“Most studies that evaluate the constructed food environment and its association to chronic diseases have been significantly smaller or conducted in isolated locations,” said Rania Kanchi, MPH, the study’s lead author and a researcher in NYU Langone’s Department of Population Health.
“Our study’s national scale allowed us to identify the many types of communities people live in, assess their food environments, and track their progress over time. In a manner that other studies don’t, the size of our cohort allows for geographic generalizability.”
The researchers examined data from the Veterans Health Administration (the country’s largest single-payer healthcare system), which included over 9 million veterans seen at over 1,200 health institutions across the country.
From the VA electronic health records (EHR) between 2008 and 2016, the researchers created a national cohort of more than 4 million veterans without diabetes. Each veteran’s health was tracked through 2018 or until he or she got diabetes, died, or missed more than two years of appointments.
Within a one-mile walk in high-density urban neighborhoods, a two-mile drive in low-density urban neighborhoods, a six-mile drive in suburban communities, and a 10-mile drive in rural communities, the proportion of restaurants that were fast food and the proportion of food outlets that were supermarkets were tabulated.
Veterans were tracked for five and a half years on average. T2D was newly diagnosed in 13.2% of the cohort at that time. Males were more likely than females to develop T2D. (13.6 versus 8.2 percent).
Adults who were non-Hispanic Black had the highest rate (16.9%), followed by non-Hispanic whites (12.9%), non-White Asian and Hispanics (12.8%), Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (15%), and Native American and Alaskan Indians (15%).
When stratified by community type, 14.3% of veterans living in high-density urban areas acquired T2D, while those living in suburban and small-town areas had the lowest frequency (12.6 percent).
Overall, the researchers found that the impact of the food environment on T2D incidence varied depending on how urban the town was, but not by the location of the country.
