Researchers also found association with fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, lower weight
MONDAY, Nov. 9, 2015 (HealthDay News) — More home-cooked meals may equal lower risk of type 2 diabetes, according to research scheduled to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association, held from Nov. 7 to 11 in Orlando, Fla.
Geng Zong, Ph.D., a research fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues collected data on nearly 58,000 women who took part in the Nurses’ Health Study and on more than 41,000 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. At the start of these studies, none of the participants had diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or cancer.
The researchers found that participants who ate about 11 to 14 homemade lunches or dinners a week had about a 13 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, compared with those who ate less than six homemade lunches or dinners a week. The researchers didn’t have enough information on breakfasts to include that meal in their analysis.
“We tried to analyze differences in the diet of these people and found, among other differences, that there was a slightly lower intake of sugar-sweetened beverages when people had more homemade meals, which is another bridge linking homemade meals and diabetes in this study,” Zong told HealthDay. The researchers also noted that people who ate at home more often were slightly leaner.
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