And my Chicago, these days, tends towards the lakeshore from Highland Park down to Hyde Park, with few reasons to go further inland except for business.

You probably lived in inner city Portland, which is more into exercise and healthy foods. Go out to Gresham (Eastern working class/low income suburb), or even further to the rural East or Southern Oregon and there are lots more heavy folks.

(Note that I have lived in five Canadian and three American cities, seven of them in the latter half of my life. Right now figuring out return to one of the eight or on to a ninth.)

http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2008/07/fatness-index.html

But I don’t think it’s a methodology difference. First, they appear to both be telephone surveys ( http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/about.htm and http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/surveill/nutrition/commun/index-eng.php ). And at least at the national level, the findings have been confirmed by a survey that used the same methods across both countries ( http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/82M0022XIE/82M0022XIE2003001.htm ).

But I do think you’re right about regional differences within Ontario. The obesity rate in Hamilton (20% of males, 16% of females) is noticeably higher than in Toronto, where it’s 10% for both (Table 105-0409, http://tinyurl.com/6aog2o). The Niagara region does a pretty brisk tourist trade, so it’s also possible people you saw were a mix of Americans and Canadians.

My anecdotal observation might reflect the more working-class and working-poor character of this end of the Golden Horseshoe. However, it might also reflect bias in the underlying data. In Canada, regardless of the province, there is some form of universal healthcare. In theory, everyone’s weight is recorded in Canada, though in practice I suspect it is is merely a large majority of the population. Still, these data would be biased by excluding those who for whatever reason refuse to enter the medical system. This is probably not the main problem with these data.

Instead, I suspect that the US data are much more biased. In the US, these data are not collected by any centralized authority, no? If these data rely on hospital intake records, then it would include a disproportionate number of people whose health is poor…after all, why else would they visit a hospital? And I suspect a disproportionate share of people who have poor health are also obese. Or are these US data drawn from a representative random sample? I’d trust that more (well, optimally we’d have population data to draw on, but hell will freeze over before my paranoid countrymen would ever accept some centralized system for collecting health information administered by the Federal government).

Can anyone speak to these data sources?

“Obesity directly correlates with socio-economic class–the poorer people are, the heavier. I’m not sure where they got their data, but that would be the general underlying factor.

The southern US has the highest incidence and those states are the poorest.

The way he simplifies “They are the fattest and therefore the least healthy” is a myth. Weight is not an independent risk factor for disease. People who are big but fit have no higher risk of premature death than smaller people who are fit. And there is no way to factor out other effects of poverty–lack of medical care, cigarette smoking, cheap (fast) food, etc. in any data on morbidity or mortality.”

I can think of a few possibilities.

1. Universal health care, including preventative.

2. We’re not really talking Seattle and Vancouver but rural Washington vs rural BC (or are the proportions of urban/rural different?). However, this doesn’t probably hold up for Alaska or North Dakota which have no large cities.

3. As you say, the serving sizes and the mindset that they reflect.

http://www.nctc.net/counties/harvest/kurtk.jpg