ORLANDO – The more homemade meals a middle-aged person eats, the lower the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
That’s the key take-away from a long-term prospective observational study of nearly 100,000 health care professionals. In an analysis adjusted for demographics and lifestyle factors, the participants who ate an average of 11-14 home-prepared lunches and dinners per week had a 13% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes than those consuming 6 or fewer, Geng Zong, Ph.D., reported at the American Heart Association scientific sessions.
Geng Zong, Ph.D.
He scrutinized the eating habits of 57,994 women in the Nurses’ Health Study and 41,679 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, all of whom were free of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer at enrollment. During 26 years of biannual prospective follow-up, or 2.3 million person-years, 8,959 subjects were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
A dose-response relationship was evident. Looking at homemade meals as a continuous variable, each home-prepared lunch or dinner eaten per week decreased the long-term risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 1%-2%, according to Dr. Zong of Harvard School of Public Health, Boston.
He noted that, since this was an observational study, it can’t prove causality. Nonetheless, he offered several possible explanations to help explain the observed association. For one, health care professionals who ate 11-14 homemade lunches and dinners per week had a 15% lower risk of developing obesity during the first 8 years of follow-up, compared with those who ate 0-6. Men who ate in that fashion gained about 1 kg less body weight in the first 8 years of follow-up and women gained about 0.5 kg less than those who ate fewer home-prepared meals – that’s probably because eating out often means consuming high-fat, high-salt, processed fast foods.
Participants who frequently ate home-prepared meals also consumed fewer sugar-sweetened beverages. Dr. Zong’s coinvestigators have previously shown that drinking sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with increased risk of metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes (Diabetes Care. 2010;33[11]:2477-83).
Breakfast eating patterns weren’t included in the study because there were insufficient data. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Zong reported having no financial conflicts of interest.