The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have released new data on weight gain among people living in the United States. What they discovered, as you can see in the map above, is that people in many regions of the country are more than 30 percent over their ideal BMI, or body mass index. BMIs are used to measure the percentage of your body weight that is fat.
Since the mid-1980s, when the CDC first started gathering this data, the country has gone from having a bit of a weight problem to suffering tremendously. The main health issue here is that obesity is associated with a lot of conditions that can lead to death, including diabetes and heart disease.
Over at Wired's Superbug blog, Maryn McKenna cites the CDC report:
…obesity prevalence ranged from 20.7% in Colorado to 34.9% in Mississippi in 2011. No state had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. 39 states had a prevalence of 25% or more; 12 of these states had a prevalence of 30% or more: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia.
You can read the full CDC report here.