Skinniest counties in the US
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Saw this on CNN today:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2008/top25s/qualitylife/skinniest.html
Almost all the Bay Area counties are featured: Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara. Yet the one place in California most known for its body-image consciousness - Los Angeles - is prominently absent. What gives?
People in LA County aren’t that healthy, obviously. Just because a few people trying to become models and movie stars get plastic surgery, lipo, and dress up in supposedly the latest fashion doesn’t mean the rest of the population is healthy. LA requires you to drive. So that alone is a big disadvantage when compared to the Bay Area, especially a place like San Francisco where owning a car is a huge liability. No parking. Narrow roads. Stop signs and one-way streets everywhere. And public transportation everywhere makes it so that you basically don’t need to drive.
Just as a matter of daily living, people in the Bay Area get more exercise in a matter of a week than a lot of people elsewhere probably get in a year, just because, for instance, people in San Francisco have to walk a lot and walk a lot of HILLS. There are hills everywhere in San Francisco, and a few of those seemingly climb hundreds of feet at a ridiculously steep angle. The Bay Area also offers a lot of cuisines to choose from, and a lot of those are relatively healthy compared to fast foods. The availability of such foods will influence the health of the population there.
There’s also a large Asian population in the Bay Area, and genetically speaking, they have a higher metabolic rate. So that will account for a lot of the slimmer people in the Bay Area.
And hell, because of the parking problem, people park on sidewalks. If you’re not skinny, there’s no way you’re walking around those cars on the sidewalks. You have to be skinny to live in the Bay Area. It’s a matter of survival. If you come into the Bay Area not skinny, that place will make you skinny.
In LA County, not so much.
I agree with your comments about San Francisco and the hills but that doesn’t apply to the rest of the Bay Area. Public transportation is abysmal for the most of the Bay Area. Interesting comment about the Asian population being a factor.
I find it amusing that even the skinniest county has an average BMI (24.48) that is marginally less than ‘overweight’ (25). I wonder what the median is.