This isn’t new: The Trust for America’s Health, a non-profit in Washington D.C. has conducted the “F as in Fat” survey for 5 years, and West Virginia has always ranked among the fattest.
This year, West Virginia dropped a spot in the rankings, but that isn’t because of falling rates here. Instead, Alabama’s population got fatter and moved into the number 2 position. Mississippi has long held the title of “most obese state in the nation.”
But what is it about West Virginia that makes its population more prone to obesity? Is it as simple as just too much fast food and too little exercise?
Liz Richardson is communications director for the Trust for America's Health. She says one of the factors is poverty.
“There is kind of no one silver bullet reason why we’ve found that one state or one region is heavier than another,” she said. “But we have found that there are certain relationships with obesity and one of the strongest ones is with poverty. And West Virginia does have a relatively high rate of poverty.”
West Virginia ties with Alabama for the 7th highest percentage in the nation of people living in poverty, according to the study.
Dr. Sally Swisher is a bariatrician at the Medical Weight Loss Center in Charleston. She suspects part of the problem in West Virginia is cultural.
“Overweight people here, a lot of them don’t think there’s anything wrong with them,” she said. “They don’t see it as a medical problem. They just say ‘Oh, I’ve always been big, my mother was big, my dad was big.’ If they lived in California, they’d see it as a problem.”
Besides obesity and related problems—like hypertension and diabetes—West Virginia’s health statistics don’t look too bad on paper. We’re better than at least half of the nation in AIDS, asthma, cancer, Chlamydia and syphilis. And the only state that has a lower percentage of uninsured children is Massachusetts.
Swisher only sees adults and teenagers over 16 in her practice, but she says most have been overweight their whole lives. She says more health education in schools could make the difference for some later in life.
“I think the real key, just like in all illnesses that are induced by lifestyle is to teach children to do better from an earlier age,” she said. “Because hopefully they will grow up to not be obese and their children won’t be obese.”
West Virginia has adopted a number of obesity-reducing standards for schools, but not one that would implement stricter nutritional requirements for school lunches.
The state legislature took steps this year to require fast food chains to post calorie counts on menu boards, but it died a biscuit-encrusted death.
Besides causing a multitude of related health problems, obesity is expensive to taxpayers as well. And Richardson says data show these costs will likely increase in the future.
“We have a new section this year on how exactly the baby boomers are doing with their obesity rates, and we’re finding that the baby boomers who are between the age of 55 and 64 are a lot heavier than those who are 65 and up,” she said. “So the Medicare pop is about to get a lot heavier and that’s also going to weigh down on healthcare costs for the state to pick up.”
The report’s data were based on telephone surveys conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Richardson says in these surveys respondents are more likely to say they’re taller and weigh less than they actually do. So, if anything, this could be a pretty conservative estimate of obesity in the country.