Change Your Neighborhood, Improve Your Health

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

"The results suggest that over the long term, investments in improving neighborhood environments might be an important complement to medical care when it comes to preventing obesity and diabetes," says study author Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at University of Chicago

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/20/change-your-neighborhood-improve-your-health/#ixzz1bjYxA7Y3

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/20/change-your-neighborhood-improve-your-health/#ixzz1bjYvDF5o