The 10 Fattest U.S. States

Do you live in the fattest or slimmest U.S. state? A Gallup poll shows the girth state of the Union.

The Fatness Charts Revealed

Every year since 2008, market research company Gallup polls people about their height and weight, calculates their BMI and checks how many go beyond 30, the BMI’s threshhold for obesity. Then they publish the results as the “Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.”

There is a lot of very sober statistical data for all this over on the Gallup site, but you might just call it “calculating the fattest US state.”

The Top 10 Most Obese States

This year’s winner is the one that just last year was very unhappy about the government trying to regulate dieting habits and passed the “Anti-Bloomberg Bill,” Mississippi. The percentages show the number of people with a 30+ BMI:

1. Mississippi: 35.4%
2. West Virginia: 34.4%
3. Delaware: 34.3%
4. Louisiana: 32.7%
5. Arkansas: 32.3%
6. South Carolina: 31.4%
7. Tennessee: 31.3%
8. Ohio: 30.9%
9. Kentucky: 30.6%
10. Oklahoma: 30.5%

These ten also had higher rates of chronic diseases. 35.8% of people living there had high blood pressure, for example. In the least obese states it was 26.4%.

The Top 10 Least Obese States

So which ones always eat their greens? Check the list and tell me what the top 4 have in common:

1. Montana: 19.6%
2. Colorado: 20.4%
3. Nevada: 21.1%
4. Minnesota: 22.0%
5. Massachusetts: 22.2%
6. Connecticut: 23.2%
7. New Mexico: 23.5%
8. California: 23.6%
9. Hawaii: 23.7%
10. New York: 24.0%

I’ll be waiting for the headline “living near mountains makes you slim.” Funny also that  New “let’s ban large soft drinks” York makes the list and that health-crazy California is only at 8.

Picture courtesy of Sandra and Colin Rose.