Studying diet and diabetes in China
Published on February 8, 2016"Lindsay Jaacks conducted the first known study of diet and Type 1 diabetes in a developing country..."
"Lindsay Jaacks conducted the first known study of diet and Type 1 diabetes in a developing country..."
“It isn’t just what food we are eating that’s changing, but also how we grow that food. We need to improve our understanding of non-nutrient food exposures–pesticides, herbicides, fungicides–that may be partially responsible for the obesity and diabetes epidemics seen around the world.”
Lindsay Jaacks conducted the first known study of diet and Type 1 diabetes in a developing country–China. When she moved there, the country was in the midst of an air pollution scare. She stayed inside as much as possible and wore a mask when she went out. The experience sparked an interest in studying environmental pollutants and how they interact with diet to affect health.
Jaacks, now a post-doc at Emory University, did the study in China as a doctoral student in nutritional epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and UNC School of Medicine.
A small award from UNC’s NC Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCSOpens in new window) Institute funded five months in China collecting blood samples and dietary surveys. That led to a $150,000 grant from SanofiOpens in new window that enabled Jaacks to finish gathering and analyzing data, and then publish results.
