America’s Fattest States

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

153576724

No matter how fat American are, they are fatter in some places than others — not the waist line, but the location.

Gallup has released its report on the states where people are fastest and least fat, and have the highest chance of being diabetic and highest odds of heart disease.

Unfortunately, for those who have to cover these subjects, there are few surprises.

Fat people primarily live in the South. Thin people live in the Northeast or Plains states for the most part. An examination a little deeper than Gallup’s likely would show that the states with the most obesity are also those with the highest percentage of poor and uneducated people. These two things may not be direct correlations, but they almost certainly are related factors.

Fat people tend to live in West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee — the Confederate states that left the union, the states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Thin people live to a large extent in the far northern states, an irony given the buffer that weight provides against cold.

Below are some of Gallup’s data.

The fat:

Invalid Image
The thin:

Invalid Image

The quick:

Invalid Image

And the dead:

Invalid Image

Methodology: Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2012, with a random sample of 353,564 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

SJM Vol: 5,284,113
APH Vol: 15,405,601
POOL Vol: 1,587,265
BLDR Vol: 3,105,775
CARR Vol: 10,220,279

Top Losing Stocks

CTRA Vol: 73,319,495
SMCI Vol: 49,989,720
GLW Vol: 16,620,182
NOW Vol: 35,707,335
ENPH Vol: 13,044,064