A new study found that people with type 2 diabetes who have increased their daily healthy eating cut their costs with an average of 500 dollars a year.

5,121 people aged between 45 and 76 were part of the experiment. The control group only benefited of three sessions of diabetes support and education a year, whereas the trial group had a dietary plan and a physical activity schedule for 10 years. Results indicated that a healthy lifestyle can reduce the diabetes treatment cost due to less hospitalizations, less hospital days, and because of reduction of medication, when compared to individuals from the control group. Both groups benefited from medical assistance and care during this time, so this is a sign that a change in your eating habits could improve your condition if you struggle with type 2 diabetes.

Diabetes treatment cost reduced by healthy lifestyle, but not for Patients with Records of Cardiovascular Disease

This shouldn’t be surprising. Other recent studies have shown cardiovascular problems to be associated with diabetics, and obviously not in a good way. Although the study seems promising, there are some limitations to how easy can we generalize the results to other groups suffering from diabetics. Mostly this is because of a specific medical care required for those in the study and because results were estimated based on self-reports of patients, which might be biased because of variations in self-evaluation due to lack of medical expertise of patient. Emotions associated with the disease should be taken into account as well.

According to Diabetes Care, where the results were published, the type of intervention endured by the individuals from the trial group was an ideal type of healthy eating behavior, called intensive lifestyle intervention (ILI). This is another change that might not occur in the situated lives of patients when they try to approach eating in a different manner. So, although diabetics’ healthy lifestyles changes can, on  a long term, result in a lower diabetes treatment cost, there are, in fact, a myriad of other influences that might interfere with the good results of this change: the degree of physical damage already suffered because of the illness, other uncontrolled life events that might occur during 10 years, other multiple health conditions, fluctuation in medical services provisions (interruptions, changes to a less advantageous care plan, or, on the contrary, to a better care plan, termination or lack of medical health insurance).