Obesity Linked to Low-Income Neighborhoods in New Study

Moving from a low-income neighborhood to a better-off one could lower your risk of diabetes and obesity, a new study suggests.

During the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers looked at data from an experiment by the Department of Housing and Urban Development involving 4,500 women with children who lived in public housing where at least 40 percent of the residents in the neighborhood had incomes below the federal poverty level ($17,500/year for a single mother of two).

From 1994 to 1998, under the HUD’s Moving to Opportunity program, 1,788 women were given housing vouchers that were only valid in neighborhoods with a poverty level of under 10 percent, while another 1,312 women were given vouchers that they could use anywhere. 1,398 received no vouchers.

A decade later, a follow-up study was conducted which revealed that among the group of women who were offered housing vouchers to move to more affluent neighborhoods, the rates of morbid obesity and diabetes were both about one-fifth lower than in the control group.

“What you see 10 to 15 years down the road is giving moms a chance to move from high to low poverty areas has about the same impact on diabetes as what you see from medical interventions that were explicitly designed to reduce diabetes,” said Yens Ludwig, a professor at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study.

Ludwig expressed confidence in the results of the study even though critics argue that it was flawed because measurements of height, weight and diabetes were not taken at its start. Ludwig pointed out that the HUD measured 57 other variables and found that the three groups were comparable at the beginning of the study, so it’s logical that obesity and diabetic levels were comparable as well.

Robert Whitaker, a public health and pediatrics professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and a researcher on this study, said, “People’s health habits are often constrained by the choices they face in their neighborhoods.

“This study is one of the strongest pieces of evidence yet that improving the environments where low-income families live can have a meaningful impact on their risk of chronic disease.”

via USA Today