According to Issue Brief: Analysis of Obesity Rates by State, Indiana is one of the top ten most obese (adults with a body mass index of 30 or higher) states. In Indiana, that’s 30.8% of adults.
According to the newly released CDC data, part of the 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, the obesity rates by state from highest to lowest were:
1. Mississippi (34.9%); 2. Louisiana (33.4%); 3. West Virginia (32.4%); 4. Alabama (32.0%); 5. Michigan (31.3%); 6. Oklahoma (31.1%); 7. Arkansas (30.9%); 8. (tie) Indiana (30.8%); and South Carolina (30.8%); 10. (tie) Kentucky (30.4%); and Texas (30.4%); 12. Missouri (30.3%); 13. (tie) Kansas (29.6%); and Ohio (29.6%); 15. (tie) Tennessee (29.2%); and Virginia (29.2%); 17. North Carolina (29.1%); 18. Iowa (29.0%); 19. Delaware (28.8%); 20. Pennsylvania (28.6%); 21. Nebraska (28.4%); 22. Maryland (28.3%); 23. South Dakota (28.1%); 24. Georgia (28.0%); 25. (tie) Maine (27.8%); and North Dakota (27.8%); 27. Wisconsin (27.7%); 28. Alaska (27.4%): 29. Illinois (27.1%); 30. Idaho (27.0%); 31. Oregon (26.7%); 32. Florida (26.6%); 33. Washington (26.5%); 34. New Mexico (26.3%); 35. New Hampshire (26.2%); 36. Minnesota (25.7%); 37. (tie) Rhode Island (25.4%); and Vermont (25.4%); 39. Wyoming (25.0%); 40. Arizona (24.7%); 41. Montana (24.6%); 42. (tie) Connecticut (24.5%); Nevada (24.5%); and New York (24.5%); 45. Utah (24.4%); 46. California (23.8%); 47. (tie) District of Columbia (23.7%); and New Jersey (23.7%); 49. Massachusetts (22.7%); 50. Hawaii (21.8%); 51. Colorado (20.7%).
Picking a random BMI calculator off the Internet, a 6 foot tall person gets a BMI of 30 with a weight of 221 pounds. At 5’5″, it’s 180 pounds. The measure certainly has its limitations; you can be skinny and horribly out of shape or carrying more weight and be able to run a marathon. As a general matter though, carrying around more weight leads to more health problems and a great deal of corresponding expense.
I’m in favor of policies that encourage healthier food consumption and availability, communities that facilitate exercise and make it easier to walk, run and bike to get from place to place. I am, however, leery of the temptation to do nothing about health concerns on the theory that obesity is nothing more or less than a moral failure; a just punishment for a life of sloth and gluttony that is entirely the fault of the individual.
Is this really an area that government needs to be involved? when exactly did personal responsibility die?
I think government started subsidizing motor vehicle transportation in a big way some time in the late teens or early twenties. Not sure when they started subsidizing agricultural interests involved in the processed food industries – Great Depression to WWII era, I would guess. So, I’d look for the personal responsibility obituary sometime during the first half of the 20th century if you think that unstacking the deck against health living a little bit is evidence of its demise.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally judge people when I’m running mile 8 and have to pause at the intersection to let a doughy person smoking a cigarette in their crappy van spewing out exhaust pass by. But I also recognize that we can improve our overall outcomes more by making it easier to exercise and eat healthier foods on a structural level than we can by simply yelling at people for being lazy fatasses.
Just off the top top of my head, but the intervention in prices started after World War I, ramped up in the Depression with price collapses, and kept rolling through the 40s, 50s and 60s. Huge export markets opened up after Word War II and the “green revolution” began. (I took an agricultural economics survey class in college. It was an interesting class with a good dose of policy. )
Processed food grew dramatically in the teens and 20s. They were a boon to the housewife who used to spend a good part of her day preparing food for the family. A move to grain crop concentration and a specialization in fresh fruits and vegetables probably coincided with this period, helped by the Depression-era water projects in the West.
And despite the fact that the produce sections get bigger, the waistlines still get bigger.
Obesity raises the costs of healthcare, costs billions in disability benefits, and limits disabled peoples’ ablity to provide for their dependants. Government probably picks up 40-50% of those costs of pandemic obesity through Medicaid, Medicare and SSDI.
So government is already involved.
And, as it continues to get more involved, we can expect the other side of the spiral to continue to wind, with more than just Mayor Bloomberg working to cut out choices. It becomes a cost-benefit issue. A society that pays for each other’s health care simply cannot allow selfish individuals to make choices like smoking, donut chowing, couch potato living, etc., because the cost is shifted from the individual to society.
Interesting that although we are 10th and are 33% heavier than those skinny folks in Colorado we are separated by only 10% of the Indiana population. 30% of us are fat compared to 20% of them. That’s a lot of people yes but in the grand scheme of things, this seems to be a national issue, not just an Indiana one.
BTW to your point, 5’11”, 210lbs, and finished about 300 out of over 500 in a recent triathlon. Don’t have to be skinny to be healthy.
It is this type of thing that brings out the libertarian, tea-party supporting temptation in me (talking about a grain of sand on a beach). Government just needs to get out of the business of business. Stop subsidizing, stop competing against the private market, stop mucking up the whole economy. Government should be involved only in the activities that private business won’t and limit regulation to lowering societal costs. /rant off.
I understand the frustration and the sentiment. But it’s just not that easy. Take roads. Private business simply was not going to build the kinds of roads needed in a modern economy. So, I think government had to get involved. But design choices made it dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists in many areas. Probably also affected the proximity of grocery stores and the products sold in those stores.
Doug, why must you go straight to roads? He’s talking corporate subsidies here. There’s no reason we can’t chop out the subsidies to business *and* build great roads.
I just read a road book, so I have ’em on the brain. And my running has increased again lately; when I run, I’m very conscious of whether I am able to do so safely.
But my choice isn’t just idiosyncratic either. Roads are a very important and legitimate government function that have a dramatic effect on the way a private individual lives his or her life. They may inhibit pedestrian travel. They give preference to automobile travel. They encourage increased use of fossil fuels and impair air quality. They make agricultural consolidation more feasible both in terms of getting crops to market and getting people to the market. They make chains of huge supermarkets a more viable business model.
All of this impacts our health in one way or another. The impact is mixed: Lots of processed foods; very few famines! And it puts all sorts of thumbs on the scales of various decisions we make on a daily basis. Which is why I’m very skeptical about simplistic claims (not yours) about how health is a function of personal choices and how the decline in American health is mainly a reflection of the decline in our moral fiber.
Why do you hate freedom and individual liberty so much?
Only socialization of all wealth can provide individual liberty, because only then is his access to the material means of survival not contingent upon making someone else happy or refraining from offending someone else.
Roads would be an example of a needed government function. Same with sewers, military, judicial system, etc. But not subsidizing corn growers or regulating how much soda someone can drink.
And I don’t have problems with regulating businesses when the society cost outweighs to business incentive.
The BMI has always been a joke. Any index where you start off with women and men being on the same chart already has its limitations. (I know it’s the politically correct thing to have one unisex chart now.) Men, becaue they have more muscle mass, are naturally heavier than women. Using the BMI, I think I saw once where 95% of the players in the NFL are ranked as “obese.” I also saw something this morning about how many Olympic athletes, including Usain Bolt and Roger Federer, are considered “obese” according to the BMI chart.
Of course as long as this is a relative state-by-state comparison it still has merit. I would like to see more information on how they conducted the study. Some of these surveys, they look at such things as how many health clubs each state and how much a state spends on health. This study din’t appear to do that.
Nevertheless, the “somewhere” you read about Olympic athletes was hardly a legitimate source. It was a website from some people who have devised their own weight/health calculator and who informally did the BMI on some Olympic athletes in order to the “prove” that the BMI is rubbish. Here is the link: http://tiny.cc/v12sjw
While it may seem intuitive that men and women should be on a different index, health risks tend to increase for both men and women at the same place on the BMI. The BMI is not trying to be polically correct, despite what your ideology tells you. Obviously, BMI has its limits. Some top athletes could appear to be obese. Some NFL players really are obese or at least flabby, however. Being an athlete is not necessarily an indication that someone is at an ideal weight or in top health.
Here is a page with much helpful information on the BMI:
http://tiny.cc/u42sjw
Government on some level is involved in every economic market in the U.S. It has always been that way. Before 1863, depending on your race, the government greatly influenced your ability in the South to trade your farm labor for wages. The government has continuously subsidized the airline industry by building all of the airports. So, it’s just a matter of where you draw the line. You can argue for less government regulation in specific contexts, but I don’t anyone who could tolerate the brutality of truly free market. And, I see nothing wrong in government sponsored incentives that make people healthier.
The political scientist Harold Laswell wrote in 1938 that politics is about “who gets what, when and how.”
Every choice is a political and economic choice. Some efficient, some inefficient, by standard economic analysis. Some fair, some unfair, by some groups’ subjective standards.
Every business person I know, including me, is all in favor of competition. But give them (me) a chance and they will find a way to stop the other fellow from competing with them.
If the government was doing its job, they would have never let High Fructose Corn Sweetener into the American food stream. I’m sorry, but I don’t think it was just an unhappy coincidence that the rise of obesity and “The Diabeetus” started with the adoption of HFCS instead of cane sugar.
And if it wasn’t for government oversight on the “Free Market”, you entrepreneurs would be trying to find ways to replace expensive ingredients with sewage sludge and ground-up drywall to increase your profit margin.
Wikipedia on BMI details the (many) shortcomings of the measure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index
I conclude that you can pretty much disregard anyone who tries to advise you about your weight based on a single BMI calculation.
I think BMI remains popular as a measure because it is easy to calculate and has a veneer of authority – why, its based on actual math!
Johnny from Badger Grove –
You might be interested in Gary Taubes’ book “Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It” – it covers some of the effects of HFCS, and goes into the history and politics of why it has become ubiquitous.
Ruthlessly compressed version of his thesis: Carbohydrates = Bad
Parker-
It’s in the hopper on my Kindle. Thanks for the suggestion!
I agree that processed foods are not healthy in large quantities or if they are the only things eaten. Fruits and vegetables, moderate amounts of meat, lots of plant proteins are best.
But I take offense at the “fact” or moral judgment that fat people always eat more and are lazy. It just isn’t the case. Most fat people today are fat because they’ve dieted most of their lives. Those of us alive today are alive because of a long evolutionary history in which our ancestors’ bodies adapted to hold on to calories in time of famine. When we diet, we go back into famine mode, our bodies do with fewer calories and hold on to more fat because they think we wont’ have food for a while. That’s why diets don’t work and people regain any weight they’ve lost, and more. For many people, it requires a near-superhuman effort and focus on nothing else to get to and stay at a “normal” weight and BMI. If diets worked, we’d all be thin.
Plus, fat does not always equal unhealthy. I walked the mini-marathon several years ago at more than 200 pounds (I’m 5’3″, so I think my BMI is between 35 and 40), and my blood pressure yesterday was 100/62. I regularly lift weights, a couple times a week more than 16,000 lbs each time. I went to law school at night, while I worked full-time. I am now a single mom working full time and writing a novel and memoir in the early mornings and weekends. I’ve passed three bar exams, including the patent bar, and one bar exam while I was going through chemotherapy. And during it all, I’ve been fat; never less than 200 pounds. I dare anyone with a straight face to call me lazy, make any moral judgment that my life has been full of “sloth and gluttony,” and that’s why I’m fat.
I’m usually quiet, Doug, but you touched a nerve.
Ahh shucks just go to the State Fair and pig out on that deep fried cookie dough and maybe a deep fried Twinkie and don’t worry about those silly ratings!
There are many ways to calculate BMI. The Army used a tape test. Height/weight and if you exceeded the weight guidelines they measured chest, waist, and neck.
I think the chart BMI, is a good ball park figure. My BMI is 29.2. In a machine test I recorded 26% body fat. It is true that if you have a lot of muscle mass, your BMI may be less accurate. However, I think that people that chart as high, should consult a physician to determine if they are in fact obese.
It isn’t much different that portable breathalyzers. They aren’t 100% accurate, but a high reading indicates need for a more accurate assessment.
You can argue about BMI, but you can’t argue about Hoosiers’ large collective ass size or their high smoking rate. No wonder Indiana is such a great place to set up a hospital or a health-related business.