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People in the South are not so fat after all -- and they lie less
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| Contributor | particleman |
| Last Edited | particleman Apr 14, 2013 07:36pm |
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| Category | Study |
| Author | Mike Oliver |
| News Date | Friday, April 12, 2013 04:50:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The South often gets tagged with having the most obese population. But it doesn't appear to be true, a University of Alabama at Birmingham study suggests.
How did Southerners get such a fat reputation? Apparently because they are more truthful. The notion that the South is the fattest comes primarily from a nationwide telephone survey done by the Centers for Disease Control, in which the surveyor asks for height and weight, among other things, Howard said.
That survey, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), shows the South as the most obese, with Mississippi and Alabama, the number one and two fattest states respectively. But the UAB researchers found that when people were actually weighed, the numbers didn't add up.
By comparing the BRFSS self-reported weight data with the REGARDS scale-weight data, researchers found that most everyone fudges, or underreports, their weight when asked on a telephone. Turns out that Southerners fudge less, he said.
The study analyzed the weights in the nine geographic regions used by the U.S. Census Bureau. It found that the West North Central region, which includes Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and North and South Dakota, ranked fourth in obesity by the telephone survey results. But when actually weighed in the REGARDS study, people from that region ranked first in the nation for obesity.
"Everybody underreports their weight but women do it more," Howard said. Men, on the other hand, do something else that affects the Body Mass Index, which is weight divided by height squared and is used to define obesity. "They overreport their height, which makes them seem less obese." |
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