I’m surprised Wisconsin isn’t among the ten worst, considering its output of dairy products, alcohol, and red meat. I remember reading somewhere once that it had the highest level of heart disease in the US. I also remember from living there that the people aren’t terribly concerned about tobacco-related diseases either (or at least they weren’t in 1988–90).
As for Minnesota, I spent roughly two-thirds of my life there, and by the time I finally left it had just as many porkers as any other state of the Union.
I hope you did not see my post as a personal attack; after all, you did not write the article. Unless you did. In which case, I blame your editors.
I just like to know I can get to the facts behind the articles - isn’t that the point of the internet? The report website is actually pretty interesting, and includes a lot of sources for the data. (Including, yes, even Morbidity and Mortality Weekly. Even I don’t read those.)
Yes, most of the states are in the 24.1% - 29.7% range for obesity with Minnesota, but Minnesota herself ranks 13th at 25.7%.
Wisconsin is pretty high on obesity, binge drinking, and smoking, but apparently the high rate of high school graduation, physical activity, health insurance, and immunization off-sets that.
Remember that, if people go and read the report, they’re not reading the shitty news sites. Shitty news sites have no vested interest in having you get your information straight from the original source.
Stuff like this also poses a problem for discussion forums like this one, because it’s not unusual for people to read an article about some alleged problem, get all outraged, and post a rant about it, without ever going to the original source. It then turns out, quite frequently, that the news story they’ve relied on has completely screwed up in its analysis of the original source.
One recent example i can think of is when magellan01 embarrassed himself with a thread on a court ruling about the Department of Justice’s investigation of the New Black Panther Party. The crappy news site referenced by the OP misrepresented the nature of the court ruling, as a quick perusal of the ruling would have made clear to anyone willing to take five minutes.
There was also a thread on the cost of subsidizing renewable energy where the OP, ralph124c (quelle surprise!), used a poor interpretation of a report as the basis for his own even worse interpretation.
Not at all. I’m not sure how I gave that impression unless I might have seemed a bit passive aggressive, but that certainly wasn’t my intent. I was actually going to refer you some of the publications offered by the US GPO but those are pretty expensive so I figured I would try to find out if the MMWR was available online.
Expensive - really? So much stuff is free, or at least free for direct download. I get those scheduled email updates from a lot of government agencies; I can’t keep up with the free stuff, never mind paying for anything. But then, I am not in academia.
I think reports like this are very informative, as long as you know what metrics are being evaluated. I just get so frustrated when we are not given the links. I believe an educated press filtering and analyzing information is A Good Thing. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to check out the “raw data” for myself. When any news site does not provide links to the background information, they loose credibility in my eyes. This is the internet; last I checked, links were free.
What stands out to me is how the Least Healthy ones are all Republican states, and (most) of the Most Healthy ones are Democratic!
Apparently the political attitude in a state can affect the general health of the population – a more ‘progressive’ approach to public health concerns translates into actual improvements in healthy outcomes.
Theres a lot of rural poverty in the Arkansas Delta. A lot of smaller towns have trouble keeping Doctors. My hometown is considered a regional hospital and even there doctors come in on 4 year contracts and then leave. My mom has to drive thirty miles to see her primary doctor. The local hospitals do routine care and operations. Most of the specialists are in Little Rock. People from all over the state come to the Little Rock hospitals for major operations.
Oklahoma and Kentucky don’t have particularly large proportions of blacks, and W. Virginia very white.
I suspect its proportion under the poverty line that’s the determining factor. This list of states by poverty rate tracks the “most/least healthy list” pretty closely.
Hardly. We have lots of local bakeries that make doughnuts, and better ones than the way over-ratedones from Krispy Kreme. They were here for a while, but closed up – people here soon decided that they were over priced and not that good.
