Moving Out of a Poor Neighborhood Reduces Obesity and Diabetes Risk

Moving Out of a Poor Neighborhood Reduces Obesity and Diabetes Risk - - TIME Healthland:

'via Blog this'

Does where you live influence your health? Yes, and maybe even more dramatically than you might expect.

When a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offered a program in the 1990s to move families out of poor neighborhoods, it created a unique opportunity not only to improve people's day-to-day lives, but also to study how a change in environment might impact their health over the long term. Now, more than a decade later, the researchers have found that families who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods had lower levels of obesity and diabetes than those who stayed behind. What's more, the improvements in health were as significant as those that typically result from targeted diet and exercise interventions or the use of medications to treat diabetes.