Is your neighborhood driving your diabetes risk?

I tell you all the time that the road to better health doesn’t have to be hard. And I mean it.

You don’t need to sweat bullets at the gym seven days a week to get results. Because even a 20 minute walk after dinner can work wonders for your health…so long as you make this routine part of your day-to-day life.

But if you still find yourself struggling to make the commitment, it might be time to consider a change of scenery…

The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a very interesting study out of Ontario. It was 11 years long—and it showed that obesity and diabetes risk might have a lot to do with the “walkability” of your neighborhood.

What does that mean? Well in order to assess walkability, the researchers accounted for four different factors: 1) the density of the population, 2) the density of residential buildings 3) the number of “walkable” destinations (like stores or services), and 4) the interconnectivity of streets.

The researchers then assigned each area a value ranging from 0 to 100 based on these factors and ranked them accordingly.

But that’s not all. They also looked at healthcare data collected from nearly three million Canadian residents between 2001 and 2012. Along with results from community health surveys from adults between the ages of 30 and 64 during the same period.

Their findings? Walkable neighborhoods had lower rates of overweight and obesity over the entire time period—by more than 10 percent, in fact.

And as you might guess, diabetes rates followed suit—with new cases being the lowest in walkable neighborhoods across the board. And annual rates dropping dramatically over the study period in areas with the highest walkability.

On the flip side, obesity and diabetes rates stayed higher with no sign of decline over a decade in the least walkable neighborhoods.

In other words, the most walkable neighborhoods—where people were much more likely on any given day to walk to get where they need to go, as opposed to driving—were just plain healthier.

The researchers behind this study were surprised by just how large of a variation there was between obesity and diabetes rates from neighborhood to neighborhood—all based on walkability factors. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

We all know that walking is good for you.

And speaking from personal experience, I can attest to this phenomenon. Navigating the streets of New York by car is rarely worth the trouble. And I’ll tell you what—my health is a whole lot better for it.

In fact, Manhattan has some of the lowest obesity rates in the entire world. Why? Because we walk pretty much everywhere.

Granted, moving to the Big Apple may not be an option for you. But if driving less and walking more is, you’d be smart to take advantage of it every chance you get.

For more simple, practical tips for preventing—and even reversing—obesity and diabetes, check out my complete Metabolic Repair Protocol. This protocol includes the detailed advice I give my own patients to help them overcome these dangerous conditions. And now, I’ve found a way to make this effective, science-backed technique available to everyone, without having to travel to my office here in Manhattan. In fact, you can get started today, right from the comfort of your own home.

Source:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/863694


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