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Where Is America's Healthiest State?

by Andrea Garcia-Vargas

God Bless America, land of heart disease and home of the obese. America's Health Rankings released a new report Wednesday that reveals that the United States is actually doing better than ever. The report also ranks our states in order of healthiest to least healthy. So who wins, and who needs to lose some weight?

The rankings, which are based on many factors — including rates of smoking, obesity, exercise, and diabetes — show that Hawaii comes in at #1, followed by Vermont, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire in the top five.

And as for the least healthy states: Oklahoma, West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and in last place, Mississippi.

Here are some of the relieving health trends the report saw in the last year among Americans:

  • Smoking rates have dropped from 21.2 percent of the adult population to 19.6 percent.
  • Obesity rates have not risen. They haven't dropped either, but guess what — this is the first year since 1998 that obesity rates have not increased.
  • Physical inactivity has decreased from 26.2 to 22.9 percent of the adult population

Unfortunately, the number of adults diagnosed with diabetes has increased. Here are just a couple of the factors that may have impacted how states from Hawaii to Mississippi did on the rankings:

  • People with health insurance
  • Childhood immunization
  • Preventable hospitalizations

Generally, the higher the rates for all of these factors, the higher the state's health ranking (although Mississippi did have high rates of immunization). We're not going to turn this into an lecture, but while the implementation of Obamacare does have its flaws, perhaps we can look forward to even better health next year — once access is improved.

And we all know what good health looks like, don't we?

Image: cheezburger