Southerners Aren't The Fattest, They Just Lie Less On Surveys, Study Shows

Americans generally identify the South as the region with the fattest people, with Mississippi and Alabama often considered the heaviest states. However that notion is being challenged by a researcher at the University of Alabama who thinks that the South isn't really fatter, but that people there are just more honest when asked about their weight.

"We were thinking since people living in the South are generally more hypertensive and have higher rates of diabetes and stroke, it would be the fattest region," George Howard, of the University Of Alabama School of Public Health said, according to a news statement. "But when we looked at our data, people in the South were really not the fattest."

Howard compared the results of the long-running REGARDS study, which analyzed stroke data across America with data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Mississippi and Alabama are grouped with Tennessee and Kentucky in what the studies call the East South Central region.

The REGARDS study put the region at 34 percent obese and the NHANES survey marked the region at 31 percent obese.

Citing the study data, Howard said that the fattest part of America is actually the West North Central region, which includes the states of North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri. He said the region has a 41 percent obese population.

A reason why the South has long been perceived as the fattest place in America, Howard said, might be because the state-by-state obesity rankings that are typically cited use self-reported height and weight data.

"Asking someone how much they weigh is probably the second worst question behind how much money they make," Howard said. "From past research, we know that women tend to underreport their weight, and men tend to over-report their height."

When comparing the equivalency between the regions' self-reported height and weight data with clinically measured data, Howard found the East South Central region to show the least misreporting.

"This suggests that people from the South come closer to telling the truth than people from other regions, perhaps because there's not the social stigma of being obese in the South as there is in other regions," Howard said.

The findings may have implication on how government funds to fight obesity are allocated.

"A lot of decisions are based on geographic differences in obesity - such as how much federal funding goes to regions to fight obesity," Howard said. "Typically, the South has received the most because others have said it's the fattest, but it might not be. The South has had very bad obesity problems, but not worse than some other regions."