i have been to California twice (i am UK) and i notice it different to most of the USA. people eat healthier, smoke less and generally seem to be fitter (no offense to the rest of you!). why is this?
It’s a Hollywood image. Maybe in and around LA are your observations true, but I’m sure the rest of the state is no different from the rest of the US.
Where else have you been, for comparison? And how long did you stay there? California is no more like its Hollywood image than Hemel Hempstead is like London.
I think your charaterizations apply pretty well to urban/suburban SoCal (San Diego, El Lay, Santa Barbara, etc.) and also to the San Franscisco Bay Area. In my experience, they’re especially accurate about the Bay Area, where health-nazis abound. However, that’s a pretty small sliver of the state. Drop by Fresno or Barstow for a slice of middle America. If you really want to be disabused of your stereotype, go to Turlok.
As for why these characterizations are true, I think it’s a combination of people and climate. The climate along the Pacific coast is perfect all year. There’s almost never a weather-related excuse to sit inside and do nothing. Given the climate, ocean, mountains, etc. there’s just so many healthy things to do. Compare to much of the midwest where a winter “sport” is bowling with a beer in one hand.
Also, the universities and media industries in this area attract young people who are concerned about their appearance. Most of the fit-freaks I know in the Bay Area couldn’t care less about being thin; they just want to go out and do something. However, there are plenty of image-conscious people too, if not more than in the Midwest, at least higher profile. These things tend to feed themselves since if you’re constantly exposed to a few fit beautiful people, there’s more motivation and peer pressure to get fit yourself.
What part of california did you visit Knight?
I think of California as the granola state, what’s not fruit & nuts is flakes.
I’m from there. Sonoma County.
First: People in SoCal most often are from somewhere else, whereas northerners (north of San Francisco) are often native to the region. Northern Cal folks kind of view SoCal folks the way you all in the UK look on Americans stereotypically.
In my experience it IS easier to live healthy out there IF one chooses to do so. Locally owned resturants and grocery stores are definitely a little more sensitive to those customers wanting to practice healthy diets.
I don’t have definitive data on it (and would be interested in seeing some if anyone has any), but my impression as a native is that proportionally there are a lot more vegans, vegetarians, etc. in CA in general and Northern Cal in particular.
As to why this is, I could only speculate that living in a spectacular (if threatened) natural environment encourages residents to take care of their own personal envirenments. Or if we were to go negative, we could say it’s because CA people have less religion and more personal vanity and so wish to treat physical health and perfection as an almost religious thing.
Well, to some of us, it’s home. Even though I don’t live there anymore, I still think of it as home, and still want to go back.
Talk about an expensive place to live, though! Sheesh!
–The other folks here want to know what part of Cali you visited. I’m interested in what parts of “most of the USA” you visited.
There is a bit of a stereotype to Californians. There is also a stereotype to Texans. Both are based on very broad assumptions and a few bad examples.
Tell me about it. 650/month for a crappy little studio apartment…and I got the cheapest one I could find!
Native Californian here, living in Minnesota for the past seven years. I’m from the Bay Area. I have noticed several differences between the two states.
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Smoking. It’s pretty much unheard of to smoke indoors in California; lots of the people I knew who smoke didn’t smoke inside their own homes or cars in order to cut down on second-hand smoke.
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Weather. There is no winter to speak of. See previous posts re: length of outdoor activity season (all year).
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Food. I went to A Taste of Minnesota a few years ago. Apparently Minnesota tastes batter-fried and greasy (the big hit from this year’s State Fair was a deep-fried Snickers bar). California, on the other hand, is a bit healthier; steaks are smaller in restaurants, there are many more vegetarian options. Lots more variety of seafood, too.
You’re carefully drawing the border of Northern California north of SF, and I think that skews your premise by creating a NoCal with no major metropolitan areas. I think the real correlation would be that most rural inhabitants are native and a much higher proportion of urban dwellers are non-native. I think this applies everywhere, not just in California.
Wherever you include SF, it “seems” to have a fairly low density of native Californians. I say “seems” because I don’t have population figures, but in all my years living and working in the Bay Area, I knew very few native Californians and even fewer who were native to the Bay Area. It’s simply the nature of an urban area to attract people to jobs, schools, etc.
It’s not terribly germane, but I think your comparison of NoCal/SoCal would be more properly stated as a comparison of rural vs. urban/suburban populations and is likely to be evident everywhere in the world.
That maybe true of the coasts, but as other people have said, the interior of California is much different. It’s not so much of a clean “North South” split, but a diagonal split between North and East and South and West.
In other parts of the country, there are also differences in fitness and exercise culture. In Austin, Texas half of the people seem to jog, bicycle, or walk to work and school, whereas in the rest of Texas one may feel the need to drive to work if it is only 1/4 a mile away. I like to walk to and from school and work (about 2 miles away) to get some exercise. But it seems that here all pedestrians are hitchhikers, drifters, or homeless. Since I am decently dressed and clean shave, I’ve had people ask me if my car broke down and I need assistance and a lift. If I tell them no, that I want to walk home - I often get a puzzled look.
Also in Florida, I noticed that there were huge disparities between the beach areas, and resorts - and more humdrum towns in the interior - as far as hardbodies were concerned. I think peer influence, and the fact that beaches, campuses, and resorts attract a certain crowd are part of it.
Last year I went to Arkansas and Oklahoma, and I recall making the observation that everyone seemed to look either nearly anorexic or severly obese. That’s probably an gross exaggeration, but that was my impression…
Others have mentioned that the SF Bay area and the LA/San Diego area attract a lot of people who are not native Californians.
Dare I suggest that there is a kind of selection process going in here? Maybe those people who want to go to California are the types of people that the OP identifies–fit, non-smoking, sports-oriented. Frankly, and I know this doesn’t prove anything, everyone I know who has moved to those areas is thin and good-looking!
California is just the United States of America, on a smaller scale. About the only thing the state doesn’t have that other states do is a city with a heavily populated downtown center, like New York or Chicago.
Los Angeles is the definition of sprawl and San Francisco’s urban center is much smaller than New York’s and Chicago’s.
The state has enormous rural areas and the #1 industry in the state is agriculture. There are few crops that California grows that it isn’t in the top 3 among states nationwide.
The state truly defies classification into one category. It can be just about anything.
People who do not live, work and play in CA seem bitterly jealous. 
No one will feel jealous after the next big quake on the San Andreas Fault. :o
People in California love to believe this. In fact, people in Texas feel everyone envies them. So do people in Colorado. People in New York, especially NYC, know everyone wants to be a New Yorker and couldn’t care less. It’s human nature to set yourself apart, and even people in <* insert horrible place without offending anyone *> probably think they’re the envy of the world.
If you leave CA, I think you’ll find a much larger number of people who are smug that they aren’t Californian than who are actually envious, and the ones who are envious are misled by the same stereotype as the OP.
To answer the OP, with a mixture of scorn and bemusement.
I’m thousands of miles away from CA & travel often. But they do seem healthier in comparison to others. For example, I hear that New Orleans has the highest obesity rate, & it appears that way when I go there. Now time for a cite:
http://moneycentral.msn.com/articles/insure/basics/6052.asp
CA is actually ranked #21!
…but don’t California politicians (M&F) have the absolutely worst hairstyles of any public grouping?