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By January W. Payne (US News)
Posted October 28, 2009
You’re planning to move, and you’re sure you’ve thought of everything: a good school system, affordable property taxes, a manageable commute. But what about your health? It turns out that where you live may have an impact on your risk of obesity and diabetes.
A study published this month in Archives of Internal Medicine found that living in a healthy neighborhood—defined as one that encourages you to ditch the car keys, get moving, and eat more healthfully—may lower the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 38 percent. Previous research has found that living somewhere with these qualities may lower the risk of obesity. “Some neighborhoods encourage people to make healthful choices by providing the amenities and opportunities for those choices,” says Jennifer Black, lead author of a review about neighborhoods and obesity published last year in Nutrition Reviews. Other neighborhoods have barriers to physical activity and to making healthful dietary choices, such as high crime rates or no (or limited) access to shopping or services within walking distance, she says. So find a place where you “feel safe to live, move, walk, work, shop, and eat,” as well as participate in community activities that meet your social needs, Black says. Here are some specific things to look for to make your next neighborhood a healthy one:
Walkability of the neighborhood, including sidewalks. Some new neighborhoods that encourage physical activity are built so that residents can walk to obtain nearly all of the services they need—dry cleaning, restaurants, hair salons, barber shops, gyms, and more. But it’s harder to re-engineer an existing neighborhood to include these services, so this kind of place may be tough to find, says Steven Smith, executive director of the Translational Research Institute at the Florida Hospital and Burnham Institute for Medical Research at Lake Nona in Orlando. Even if you have to get in the car for your errands, though, look out for sidewalks so you can at least move within your neighborhood.
