Article on the states with the worst eating habits only 30 % accurate....

Today's Post: Friday, 2-11-2011

Today, an article titled “10 States With the Deadliest Eating Habits” from a news service called “24/7 WALL St” was on Yahoo and in one of the health info emails I get. The text shows the readers of 24/7 WALL St may have seen it on Weds, 2-9, earlier this week.

They got Mississippi and Alabama right as two of the worst and ranked them as the two worst states. Oklahoma that they had as 5th worst is clearly in the top 10. But the other 7 states while having some bad points were clearly not that bad. They ranked Missouri as 3rd worst despite it not having any worst 10 listings at all for example though it was #9 for their obesity rate. But they failed to list all the states in the top 10 for that measure.

The problem is that they included so many secondary indicators and too few direct ones.

“Gallons of Soft Drinks Purchased Per Capita” I presume per year – that they did include and it very clearly belongs. (See our post yesterday for example.) But they somehow did not list all the top 10 states on this measure.

For Oklahoma, they noted that: “Oklahoma also has the third-lowest rate of adults who meet the recommended two fruit/three vegetable daily intake, with only 9.3% of adults doing so. Perhaps this is part of the reason Oklahoma's obesity rate is 31.4%, the fifth-worst in the country.”

But they apparently did not realize that these two measures are so important and many of the 6 worst states for each of these measures failed to make their list.

For Mississippi they had: “Mississippi has the worst eating habits in the country. Only 8.8% of the adult population eats the recommended amount of daily fruits and vegetables, the lowest rate in the country. Residents consumed just under 82 gallons of soft drinks per capita in 2006, the greatest amount reported. …. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the state has the highest rates of both adult diabetes (12.8%) and adult obesity (34.4%).”

Earlier this week we posted that it is also one of the states with the highest death rate from strokes, heart attacks, and heart failure.

But this rating system did not list the “% of the adult population eats the recommended amount of daily fruits and vegetables” or the “rates of both adult diabetes (12.8%) and adult obesity (34.4%)” as criteria.

If they had all the 6 worst states on those measures, their ratings would be far more accurate.

They also did not manage to find a measure of pounds of trans fats eaten per capita which also clearly belongs in this list.

In addition, even more important than just the eating habits, is which of the states have the worst health habits.

Many of the actual worst states on eating habits also are in the worst 10 on the percent of the people who do smoke and are also among the states with the fewest who get regular exercise.

I think had they done all those things, the other stroke belt states besides Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma would have been in their worst 10 list.

Lastly, I was appalled to see that most of the states listed had 52 or more gallons of soft drinks purchased per capita.

There are a bit over 10 & a half 12 ounce servings in a gallon of soft drinks. That’s an average of about 1 & a half soft drinks every single day of the year as a state average. But according to that one source I found that means that the average person in all these states carries 22.5 pounds of fat – just from drinking soft drinks! Mississippi, with its 82 gallons means that the average person there carries 35.5 pounds of fat just from drinking soft drinks. And, Alabama was close with 77 gallons.