A new study reports that weight, diet, exercise, smoking and alcohol intake may each independently influence a person's risk of getting diabetes. Researchers found that even when people had a family history of diabetes or were overweight, they were less likely to get the chronic disease if they were healthy in other ways.
And each additional lifestyle improvement lowered their risk. "There are implications certainly for individuals to take one step at a time toward a healthy lifestyle," said Jared Reis, one of the study's authors from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
And, he told Reuters Health, "there is certainly benefit for those who may have a tough time with losing weight if they adopt these other healthy lifestyle factors."
The data came from more than 200,000 Americans who filled out surveys about their lifestyle, diet and health status in 1995 and 1996, when most were in their fifties and sixties. None of them had diabetes at the start of the study.
Ten years later, researchers sent them another survey asking whether they had been diagnosed with diabetes.
In all, about one in 10 men and one in 13 women reported having the disease.
Looking back at the original surveys, the researchers broke health and lifestyle-related questions into five categories: body mass index (BMI, a measure of weight in relation to height), diet, physical activity, smoking and alcohol consumption.
They found that each healthy behaviour listed on that survey - such as exercising for at least 20 minutes a day, three times per week, or never smoking or quitting at least a decade ago - lowered a person's future diabetes risk independent of the other lifestyle components.
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