Environmental stress contributes to obesity and diabetes (2015)

When they went back and measured the differences between people who got vouchers and people who didn’t, the results were remarkable: The people who got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods had significantly lower rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. And cortisol’s physiological effects could explain the powerful links between stress and metabolic illnesses like Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. But that’s not the case: Black Africans have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and depression than their distant cousins in the U.S. And Hasson says Type 2 diabetes among blacks and Hispanics drops just as fast as among whites in response to changes in exercise or diet—powerful evidence that there’s no inherent physiological difference at play.

Source: nautil.us