New visualizer: U.S. state obesity trends

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New visualizer: U.S. state obesity trends<br>Winning!

Experimental Fat Loss<br>Aug 17, 2026

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The inimitable (in-immitable.. innim-itable.. iminnitable..) Tyler Ransom has graciously done Statistical Pirate Magic (Rrrrrrrr) and generated a dataset of U.S. obesity trends by state, with most states showing data from 1990-2022.<br>You can find the dataset here: tyleransom/obesity-by-US-state<br>As he notes, the data is based on self-reported height & weight, and therefore not directly comparable to other, clinically verified reports. E.g. maybe the people in Colorado (the leanest state) are just lying about their weight😅<br>But it vaguely seems to match other datasets in that Colorado is the leanest, West Virginia is the.. not leanest, and most other states are somewhat close to what you’d expect.<br>(A few that made me skeptical: D.C. is listed as very lean, as is Hawaii. I guess they don’t call DC The Hill for nothing!)<br>In any case, since Tyler did the heavy lifting of generating the data, it was simple enough to just stick it into the graph visualizer I already had:<br>Obesity by U.S. State

Pretty interesting stuff. It looks like pretty much all the states went up and to the right in the last 35 years.<br>Colorado had the lowest absolute increase, but it still went from 6.6% to 24.6%, almost quadrupling (!) its obesity rate. In comparison, West Virginia “only” went from 15% to 14.5% to 40.7%. That’s not even a tripling! Go you, WV.<br>There aren’t many huge surprises: the lean states were much leaner as far as the data goes back, and they’re leaner now. But they still went way up, usually 3-4x.<br>If you’re curious and want to play around, check it out:<br>Obesity by U.S. State

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