unCubeme

Trust for America’s Health recently released its 2007 study on obesity in America. The meat of this study is always a scorecard of State obesity rankings. Other points of interest are rankings of physical inactivity, diabetes, hypertension, and poverty–all juxtaposed with obesity. It’s no surprise that obesity is related to all of the above American shames. The whole point of the study is to raise awareness and there are few better ways than to shock America (unless there are more blind people than I think, it’s probably not going to be easy shocking Americans by telling them that there are a lot of fat people around).

But, ranking States is also a pretty good idea because it can show that, given differences in public policy in each state, some policies work better than others. Of course, the best policy seems to be making sure everyone in your state is rich. Notwithstanding poverty, certainly education of diet and exercise couldn’t hurt, I suppose.

I suggest everyone browse through the report. Peppered throughout the report are pictures of fat people with enormous smiles–maybe they know something that I don’t. The report spends a fair amount of time looking at current policies–especially school policies in each state–aimed at obesity. Interestingly, it points out that the Federal Government tends to take a laissez faire approach on obesity while hypocritically jumping all over the bird flu scare. Obviously, these conniving politicians, at the behest of irresponsible constituents, will eventually push through more socialized healthcare in America and we are going to pay for this eventually, so it is in our best interest to control this pandemic obesity.

The key line (for me) in the report reads as follows: “Despite the rising prevalence of obesity, most Americans have an awareness of the steps that should be taken to avoid obesity.” I suspected this all along and the bottom line is that, like most problems in this country, the root cause is that Americans just don’t want to make the sacrifices required to fix and prevent problems.

The results are as follows: Mississippi is the fattest State and Colorado is the least fat. D.C. has the fattest children (starting them early to earn the shameful honor in the future or to provide a food source in the event of nuclear holocaust) while Utah has the least fat kids.