14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new scientific study released by US researchers on Thursday, people who live on streets packed with fast food diners and implicitly eat in such establishments more often than others are at a very high risk of suffering from heart strokes. The danger is more than 13 percent higher than that recorded in the case of people living in the areas with the fewest such restaurants in a Texas city region.
“The data show a true association. We need to start unraveling why these particular communities have higher stroke risks. Is it direct consumption of fast food? Is it the lack of more healthy options? Is there something completely different in these neighborhoods that is associated with poor health?” Dr. Lewis Morgenstern, who is part of the stroke program at the University of Michigan and also the lead author of the new research that has been presented at the International Stroke Conference hosted by the American Stroke Association, asks.
Residents of the Nueces County, in Texas, were surveyed for roughly three years, between January 2000 and June 2003, but researchers have yet to determine whether the association they found exists because people are actually more likely to eat fast food, or simply because the neighborhood is unhealthy. However, it remains clear, they maintain, that strokes and fast food are linked in some way.
“We need to consider targeting communities that have a lot of fast-food restaurants as places where we can improve health,” the expert shares, while adding that health authorities should take action in this sense and make of campaigns in areas with large concentrations of fast food restaurants one of their priority targets, in order to avoid the increasing number of stroke-related emergencies at local hospitals.
In the small Texas country they surveyed, scientists from Morgenstern's team found that 1,247 ischemic strokes took place within three years, and that this type of attack, which clogged veins so that blood stopped reaching the brain, was most likely to be associated with consuming a lot of fatty food and drinking a lot of soda.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some 780,000 Americans will have a stroke this year, out of which 150,000 will die. In addition, 15 to 30 percent of survivors will be left completely incapacitated, and a large part of those deaths will be caused by fast food.