Two major, long-term studies, the Nurses’ Health Study with 58,000 women participating and Health Professional’s Follow-up Study with 41,000 men participating from 1986 to 2012, were assessed by this study coauthor Zang Gong, PhD, and his colleagues for their homemade meal intake and development of Type 2 Diabetes.
At baseline no participants were diabetic or suffering from cancer or cardiovascular disease in the study’s advent.
Zong, a research fellow at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, MA, suggested that eating more meals at home would contribute to weight loss over time and explain why excess weight has been found to make one susceptible to Type 2 Diabetes.
His team set out to determine whether higher consumption of home-cooked meals would protect a person from the disease which has significantly increased in the United States, as well as consumption of take-out and restaurant fare, observed Zong Their study followed a 2015 report of Medical News Today whose study found higher caloric and salt intake when people eat out.
The U.S. Department of Commerce also this year announced that more Americans are now spending money eating out than buying groceries.
By assessing the lunch and dinners of the participants (breakfasts couldn’t be included), or 11 to 14 homemade meals per week, the team found that they were thirteen percent less susceptible to Type 2 Diabetes than those who ate fewer than six home-cooked meals per week.
The individuals consuming more home-prepared meals also gained less weight over eight years on average, most likely, it is believed, reducing their diabetic risk.
Zong’s team couldn’t pinpoint how many home-cooked meals a person should eat each week, but “more could be better,” according to him. This sounds like sound advice if a person wants to avoid Type 2 Diabetes and weight gain as well.
