Health School of Grossman’s School of New York University demonstrated the relationship between accommodation in areas with high availability of fast food restaurants and a higher risk of solid-type sugar diabetes. At the same time, a large number of shops and supermarkets in which healthy food is sold, reduces incidence. This is reported in an article published in Jama Network Open magazine.
The research team used the health data management data of the US veterans, which stores data on more than nine million veterans from more than 1,200 medical institutions throughout the country. Scientists made a cohort of more than four million veterans without diabetes based on electronic medical records for the period from 2008 to 2016. The health status of each veteran was tracked during 2018 or until a person fell ill with diabetes or not died.
Scientists also identified the number of restaurants of Fastfund, which are within walking distance in those urban areas where patients lived. For the suburbs, the distance between the house and the restaurant and the house was taken into account, equal to about 10 kilometers, and in the countryside – 16 kilometers.
During the observations, 13.2 percent of the cohort was diagnosed with a diabetes of second type for the first time. Men sick them more often than women (13.6 versus 8.2 percent). The lowest incidence rate was among those who lived in the suburbs and small cities (12.6 percent). According to scientists, since in the study veterans, most often were men with high financial stability and good health, the results cannot be summarized to all civilians whose incidence of diabetes can be much higher.