We hear constantly about how very, very obese Americans are supposed to be—both statistically and in the form of anecdotes about foreigners identifying American tourists by their girth. And while I hadn’t explicitly put it to myself this way, I had always, I suppose, taken this with a grain of salt because it was out of line with my experience: I had never noticed that the streets of (say) Paris or Madrid or London seemed any more clogged with cellulite than those of the American cities I knew. But I spent the weekend in North Carolina, and the waistline gap was immediately quite striking. This CDC map of obesity rates by state bears out the impression: The South and southern parts of the Midwest are appreciably thicker than the West or Northeast. So maybe, instead of talking about the American obesity “epidemic,” we should be talking about the narrower problem of obesity in specific regions where, for instance, lower population density means people are apt to drive rather than walk when they go out day-to-day. That might reduce the tendency of folks in the svelter parts of the country to panic that they’ve caught the “epidemic” when they stray a bit north of the local average.
Update: Ryan Avent thinks I’ve got cause and effect inverted here; click through for a proposal to make Americans lighter by making carbon taxes heavier.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Adam // Aug 13, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Well, yeah. A few years ago I moved to Philly, which recently had been named the fattest city in America. America is known as a fat country, so surely the fattest city in this fattest country had to be truly obese.
But it wasn’t, at least not in the nice gentrified city center where myself and the other graduate students lived and bar-hopped.
The surrounding poor and predominately African-American outskirts, on the other hand, were a different story. The fact is, the distribution of fat in America is — wait for it — quite lumpy.
2 von Laue // Aug 13, 2007 at 11:56 pm
here in a Maryland DC suburb, the thing that surprises me is how fat the immigrants often are. They can (and must) obtain foods closely approximating what they got in their native lands. I wonder why they get fat, seeing as how being a greedy horrible american isn’t the reason: is it the cars? relative abundance? going native?
3 Grigsby // Aug 14, 2007 at 12:23 am
and also, you must also think about the kind of food they eat down south. Most of it is basically a bland lump of grease. So they don’t walk much, and they also eat really greasy food.
4 Julian Sanchez // Aug 14, 2007 at 2:12 am
Von Laue:
Well, it depends where they’re coming from, but if you’re talking about immigrants from genuinely poor countries, you might imagine that someone moving from the brink of real hunger to a situation where they can easily afford plenty of calories (whether they’re healthy or nutritious being another story) would be inclined to go all out, as it were.
5 Emma Zahn // Aug 14, 2007 at 4:19 pm
What about insulin resistance?
Populations that not all that long ago lived mostly at a subsistence levels may not process sugars as effectively as others. There is at least one Native American tribe, I can’t remember which, for whom the modern diet is especially fattening.
What many people forget, or never knew, is just how poor the South was prior to the 1950’s, and not just blacks. There is not a lot of nutrition in cornbread and buttermilk. Pellagra was at epidemic proportions in the early 1900’s as were many other nutritional deficiencies. It is not unreasonable to think that variations in nutritional requirements exist in populations based on the diet on which that population survived.
6 Barry // Aug 15, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Emma, that would be a two-three generation gap in nutrition. Is that enough for major genetic effects? IIRC, the trend towards diabetes was noticeable in populations which were just coming out of a stone age economy.
7 Emma Zahn // Aug 15, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Barry,
I really have no idea how many generations are required to produce a genetic variation though I would guess that it is probably less than we are generally led to believe.
Then too, a large proportion of the poorer South are descendants of the people known as the Scotch-Irish who lived a very bleak existence for several hundred years before migrating first to Ulster then to here. The migrants also intermarried quite often with Native Americans.
I also really have no idea to what extent insulin resistance accounts for the so-called obesity epidemic. Personally, I sometimes wonder if Miracle-Gro is just making its way up the food chain. 🙂
Is this an outsight?
8 Kriston // Aug 16, 2007 at 12:19 pm
That map would be cooler if the lardier states were graphically engorged.
9 Kyle // Sep 5, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Hi, Julian –
I haven’t read your blog in quite some time, but saw this linked from Marginal Revolution today.
Thought I’d go ahead and share a link for a version of CDC Obesity Map that we did at Revolution Health, that allows you to see the obesity trends over time, specifically, from 1990-2006.
CDC Obesity Map:
http://www.revolutionhealth.com/healthy-living/weight-management/obesity-epidemic
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