How Your Home Location Creates a Health Risk
QHHL 
Dec 29 2020
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0 QHHL
You probably already know that your home has an impact on your health risk. But there’s a threat attached to your home that you probably haven’t noticed.
When you’re assessing your health, your home is a big factor. It determines a lot of environmental factors that are essential to your health and wellbeing. However, there’s one factor that you probably haven’t thought of. And this factor is pivotal to your health and the health of your children over the long term.
Your home location determines a number of environmental factors that impact your health. This includes:
All of these factors are strongly influenced by where you live. However, there’s an additional factor that you probably haven’t thought of. And that’s your community food environment.
Have you looked around at the food choices in your home environment lately? This is known as your community food environment. It described the most common and easily accessed food choices around where you live. And studies are suggesting that it’s essential to your health and the health of your kids.
A recent study followed two groups of 3- to 15-year-old children in cities in New Jersey. These long-term studies offered data on how changes in the food environment impacted childhood obesity rates.
The studies showed that children with more access to convenience stores were more likely to suffer obesity. This is probably due to the fact that convenience stores are packed with unhealthy, processed food choices. For example, a child who lived for 24 months within a mile of where an additional convenience store was built had a 11.7 percent chance of being in a higher body mass index range. This was compared to other children of the same age and gender.
In contrast, if you replaced that convenience store with a grocery store, the child’s chance of being in a higher body mass index range decreased by 37.3 percent.
This obviously has powerful implications for future health and wellbeing. Excess weight is associated with several dangerous and even deadly health risks. And easy access to unhealthy food choices can create bad habits that last a lifetime. That’s why it’s so important that you understand how your environment can impact your food choices.
Obviously, you can’t control what shops open near your house. But you can better understand the health risk that these represent. And this information and assessment shouldn’t only apply to your children. It also has implications for your own food habits and weight battles.
So, you need to take steps to minimize the effects of your community food environment. This will probably mean that your entire family needs more education on healthy choices. It’s also important that you pay attention to your eating habits and your children’s habits as well. Because bad dietary habits can be long lasting and catastrophic to your long-term health.
Keywords: Health Risk, Obesity