Houston's Health Crisis: By 2040, One In Five Residents Will Be Diabetic
Regularly dubbed Americas fattest city, Houstonites dietary options are merely one element of its spiralling diabetes problem. Can anything be done to reverse this deadly and very costly disease in a city addicted to sugar and vehicles?
Diabetes is so common in Patricia Grahams neighbourhood that it has its own slang term. At churches you run into people you aint seen in years, and they say, Ive got sugar, she says.
Graham does not quite have sugar, but when foot surgery in 2014 reduced her ” activities, her blood sugar level rose. And there is a history of diabetes in their own families: three of four brothers and her mother, who lost a leg to it.
So three times a week she comes to the smart, modern Diabetes Awareness and Wellness Network( Dawn) centre in Houstons third ward, a historically African American district near downtown. Use by about 520 people a month, Dawn is in effect a free, city-run gym and subsistence group for diabetics and pre-diabetics: a one-stop shop for inspiration, information and perspiration. Last Friday Graham, 68, was there for a walk-to session.
Not that she or the half-dozen other participants ran anywhere. This was strolling on the spot to pulsating music. Had the class stepped outside they would have enjoyed perfect conditions for a saunter: a blue sky and a temperature of 21 C. If they had worked up an craving, a spirit food eatery was only a 15 -minute walk away, serving celebrated( if not exactly sugar-free) food that belies its unpromising locating in a standard shopping center on a busy road next to a dialysis centre.
But most of Houston is not built for walk-to, even on a sunny January day. Theres the constant traffic belching fumes that persist in the humid air; the uneven sidewalks that have a pesky habit of fading halfway along the street; the sheer distances to cover in this elongated, ever-expanding metropolis. Strolling can feel like a transgressive act against Houstons car-centric culture of convenience and its status as the capital of the north American oil and gas industry.
Its one reason why Houston regularly finishes top, or close, in surveys that crown Americas fattest city. Unsurprisingly, it has a diabetes problem as outsized as its residents waistlines. By 2040, one in five Houstonians is predicted to have the disease.
According to data from pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, the prevalence of form 2 diabetes in the city is 9.1% with an estimated one in four of these being undiagnosed. Almost a third of adult Houstonians self-describe as obese, according to a 2010 -1 1 survey. Without action, the number of people with diabetes is projected to nearly treble by 2040 to 1.1 million people, with diabetes-related costs soaring from $4.1 bn in 2015 to $11.4 bn by 2040.
Graham is alarmed by the damage diabetes is wreaking on her community. I was talking to my friends and telling, so many of the people we grew up with got diabetes and lost extremities, she says. Its not even so much the seniors any more, its the young people. But it doesnt scare them. They act like theyre not afraid.
Another Dawn member, Verne Jenkins, was diagnosed 3 years ago. I had picked up a little bit of weight that I shouldnt have, says the 63 -year-old. I knew what to eat, I knew what I was doing, I just got out of control.
Jenkins loves to bake but has cut back on carbs, red meat, salt and sugar, abstaining from one of her guilty pleasures, German chocolate cake. Not that its easy in a city with so much selection: All these wonderful restaurants, all these different kinds of cuisines, of course youre going to try some. I imagine it leads to our delinquency, she says.
Graham has watched her diet since she was in her 20 s. I eat pretty good, she told. She eats like white folks thats what they tell me!
Time poverty
Diabetes is a major cause of demise, blindness, kidney disease and amputations in the US. While federal researchers announced last year that the rate of new diabetes occurrences dropped from 1.7 million in 2009 to 1.4 million in 2014, in Texas the percentage of diagnosed adults rose from 9. 8 % in 2009 to 11% in 2014.
Houston, Americas fourth-largest city, is one of five participating in the Cities Changing Diabetes programme, along with Mexico City, Copenhagen, Tianjin and Shanghai. Vancouver and Johannesburg are soon to join the project, which attempts to understand, publicise and combat the threat through cultural analysis.
The majority of people with diabetes live in cities, says Jakob Riis, an executive vice-president at Novo Nordisk, one of the lead partners in the programme alongside the Steno Diabetes Center and University College London. We need to rethink cities so that they are healthier to live in otherwise were not really addressing the root cause of the problem.
One of the programmes key and perhaps surprising findings, however, is that assessing the risk of developing diabetes is not as simple as dividing the population according to income and race. The problem is broad much like Houston itself.
The view stretchings for miles from Faith Foremans eighth-floor office next to the Astrodome, the famous old indoor baseball stadium. Its an impressive sight, but for someone tasked with tackling the citys diabetes epidemic, also a worrying one: the sheer scale of the urban sprawl is part of the problem. The threat of the disease has expanded along with the city.
A low cost of living and a strong jobs market helped Houston become one of the fastest growing urban areas in the US. In answer, the city loosened its beltways. Its third major ring road is under construction, with a northwestern segment set to open soon that is some 35 miles from downtown.
Once completed, the Grand Parkway whose northwestern segment has just opened will boast a circumference of about 180 miles. That is far in excess of the 117 miles of the M25, although about 14 million people live inside the boundary of Londons orbital motorway, more than twice as many as reside in the Houston area.
Large homes bud in the shadow of lately opened sections, promising cheap middle-class living with a heavy cost: a commute to central Houston of up to 90 minutes each way during rush hour, with minimal modes of public transport options.
A lot of time in Houston is spent in a car, says Foreman, assistant director of Houstons Department of Health and Human Services. This informs one of the Cities Changing Diabetes analyse most notable findings: that time poverty is among the risk factors in Houston for developing type 2 diabetes.
This means that young, relatively well-off people can also be considered a vulnerable population segment, even though they might not fit the traditional profile of people who may develop type 2 diabetes the hell is, aged over 45, with high blood pressure and a high BMI, and perhaps disadvantaged through poverty or a lack of health insurance.
You generally think of marginalised, lower income communities in poverty as your keys to health disparities but I think what we learned from our data in Houston is that we now have to expand the definition of what vulnerable is and what at-risk entails. Just because we live in an urban environment, we may all indeed be vulnerable, says Foreman.
In other terms , not only its residents dietary options but the way Houston is constructed as a city appears to be contributing to its diabetes problem, so tackling the issue requires architects as well as doctors; more sidewalks as well as fewer steaks.
Urban isolation is a key challenge, says David Napier of UCL, the lead academic for Cities Changing Diabetes. Houston is growing so quickly and also expanding geographically at such a rapid rate. When you look at how difficult it is for people just to get off and stroll, or stroll to run; the fact that so many people commute long distances, expend a lot of day eating out they have a number of obstacles to overcome, he says.
A city with notoriously lax scheming regulations is now making a conscious great efforts to set more care into its built surrounding, with more modes of public transport, expanded motorcycle trails, better parks and denser, more walkable neighborhoods all evident in recent years, even as the suburbs continue to swell.
Foremans agency has more input when officials assemble to map out the future city. That is something that has been a big change over the last two or three years in Houston, she says. We are at the table and we are working with city planning to build those decisions.
But prevention is a vital focus as well as treatment. Along with his squad, Stephen Linder of the University of Texas school of public health the local academic leading for Houstons Cities Changing Diabetes research gathered data on 5,000 households in Harris County, which includes much of the Houston area.
One way to approach this project wasnt to focus on diabetes itself but rather to look at some of the preconditioned social factors that seemed to generate the patterns of living that then led to the clinical signs that would designate people as being prediabetic, he says from his office at the Texas Medical Center near downtown Houston the worlds largest medical complex.
These were people who had neither disadvantage nor biological risk factors. They tended to be the youngest group and would normally escape any kind of appraisal we called them the time-pressured-young. Theyre the ones who did the long commutes; theyre the ones whose perception was they could not manage their days worth of stuff, that they have no time for anything.
For this group, obesity is so prevalent in Houston that it distorts an understanding of what a healthy weight is, Linder discovered. Their perception of their own health was affected by their peers as opposed to other sorts of references. If all of their peers were overweight then in a relative sense they were fine. The judgments were about ones peers and not relative to any sort of expert standard, he says.
Three neighborhoods were identified as having the highest concentration of people vulnerable to developing diabetes, and a Dallas-area research company, 2M, conducted detailed interviews with 125 residents. One place was particularly surprising: Atascocita, a desirable middle-class region near a large lake and golf course, about 30 miles north of downtown.
Houston has become, according to a 2012 Rice University analyze, the most ethnically diverse big metropolitan area in the US. But this cosmopolitan air one of the qualities sought by any place seeking to become a globally renowned city may also unwittingly be contributing to the diabetes crisis, such studies found.
Some in Atascocita, Linder told, emphasised this sense of change and transition in their neighborhoods, that that was a source of stress for them and that they were resistant to inducing changes in their own lives given the flux that was around them. Because that group happened to be older, even though they were economically secure they did have some other chronic diseases and they fulfilled our biorisk characteristics.
We call them concerned seniors. They werent inducing changes because there was too much else going on for them. And so if we were to say to them youve got to change your diet, theyd say no, I cant handle any more changes.
This matters since food sections are no exception to the everythings bigger in Texas cliche, while Houstons location near Mexico and the deep south, its embracing of the Lone Star states love of barbecued red meat and its enormous variety of restaurants serving international cuisine combining to unhealthy effect.
The food that had a traditional facet to it tended not to be the healthiest food southern food thats fried and lots of butter and lots of starch, then theres African American spirit food and then theres Hispanic heavy fat, prepared tamales and the like, and so we discovered people kind of gravitated to what the UCL people called nourishing traditions, Linder said.
People utilized food as not only a strengthening of tradition and ritual but also as a way of connecting socially. Youve moved here from somewhere else, its a way to reinforce your identity, its a real cultural asset to have, but in a biological sense its not the best thing.
For Linder, one lesson is that generalised advice about healthy eating that has long been part of diabetes awareness efforts may not be effective locally, given the intricacy and variety of Houstons neighborhoods and the social factors that build populations vulnerable to diabetes.
It does build the task of dietary change a much more complex one than the simple messages about changing your diet, eat more fruit and vegetables, get more colourings on your plate would suggest. Those things bounce off, its not a useful decide of interventions then for that particular group who rely on these nourishing traditions and find some solace in the change around them, he said.
Foreman agrees that a targeted approach is vital. How do you change diabetes in Houston? One neighborhood at a time, in a sense, but at the same day you have bigger things that you can change systemwide in policies and how you work together collaboratively, she told. But then as you narrow it and get more granular it is neighborhood, and what works in one neighbourhood may or may not work in another.
Patricia Graham is hoping that the Dawn programme expands to other parts of the city to combat the dangerous union of unhealthy traditional food with a modern convenience culture. Everything is food, and I mean lots of it and all the time, she told. Some people dont know how to cook without grease or butter. Thats just the way we learn.
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Houston's Health Crisis: By 2040, One In Five Residents Will Be Diabetic
Houston's Health Crisis: By 2040, One In Five Residents Will Be Diabetic
Houston's Health Crisis: By 2040, One In Five Residents Will Be Diabetic
Houston's Health Crisis: By 2040, One In Five Residents Will Be Diabetic
Houston's Health Crisis: By 2040, One In Five Residents Will Be Diabetic