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Healthy Behavior Map

Interesting map from Gallup which takes a look at the geographical incidence of healthy behavior:

The midyear results from the AHIP State and Congressional District Resource for Well-Being, a product of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, find the nation as a whole dropping substantively on the Healthy Behavior Sub-Index, from 63.7 in 2008 to 62.6 in the first half of 2009. The Healthy Behavior Sub-Index is one of six sub-indexes that make up the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, and asks Americans four questions: do you smoke; did you eat healthy all day yesterday; in the last seven days, on how many days did you exercise for 30 minutes or more; and in the last seven days, on how many days did you have five or more servings of fruits and vegetables. The Healthy Behavior Sub-Index scores for the nation and for each state are calculated based on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 would be a perfect score.

At this point, I mostly just find it interesting any time you see a map that doesn’t just reduce the red/blue map of presidential politics. Instead we see that both the liberal coastal west and the conservative interior west are pretty similar, while the Great Lakes look indistinguishable from the Deep South. Of course it’s not clear to me that the methodology of this survey is so great.

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