Some Country for Old Men

Today is like Christmas morning times a thousand at SCFOM, because it’s the day we get to see the latest Obesity Rankings! So which states have gotten fatter? (SPOILER: All of them!) Which states have been exercising too much, and lost ground?

Well, for starters (appetizer), your editor is actually from the South, so he already knew what was gonna happen. He’s seen enough intersections and strips of highway where there’s a Waffle House next to a Waffle House to know who’d come out on top, but, meh, we looked at the results anyway…

Mississippi’s still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers.

It’s time for the nation’s annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there’s little good news. Obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year and didn’t decline anywhere, says a new report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Haha, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. lolpenis. Ahem. More:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long said that nearly a third of Americans are obese. The Trust report uses somewhat more conservative CDC surveys for a closer state-by-state look. Among the findings:

Mississippi had the highest rate of adult obesity, 32.5 percent, for the fifth year in a row.

Three additional states now have adult obesity rates above 30 percent, including Alabama, 31.2 percent; West Virginia, 31.1 percent; and Tennessee, 30.2 percent.

Granted we’re talking about a section of the country where breakfast consists either of fried chicken and waffles, grits drenched in butter or cheese, or biscuits and gravy. But still, come on, The South, can we stop winning this title? There are surely other states out there just dying to be crowned Fat Champs.

So, hey, doctors, what can we do to fix this problem?

“There isn’t a magic bullet. We don’t have a pill for it,” said [Jeff] Levi, [executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group].

Ugh, that sucks. We were hoping the key to getting skinnier would be eating something else. Sigh.

Meanwhile, in related (but only sorta) news, the Washington Post printed this tremendous news item from Arkansas (a fat state):

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — An 800-pound hog that survived on its own for a week after a truck flipped while on its way to a slaughterhouse has surfaced in a swimming pool at a home near the crash site. LeAnn Baldy, whose house is only yards from Interstate 430, said Monday she noticed her pool was suddenly overflowing and then saw the immersed pig, which was having a drink in the pool.

About 90 hogs were in the trailer when it overturned where I-430 meets I-40, and about 60 survived. Officials said they thought the last of them had been caught.

Baldy said she found a farmer to take in the pig. A spokesman for Odom’s Tennessee Pride said it can’t use the hog in its sausage products because no one knows what the hog had been eating in its week on the lam.

Again, this is a region that eats nine meals a week at the WAFFLE HOUSE! Do we really care what our pigs eat before we eat them?

Answer: No.