Mississippi Is the Most Obese State

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 7:25AM EST · Published May 30, 9:20AM EDT

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Mississippi Is the Most Obese State — © Thinkstock

Mississippi has the most obese residents of any of the 50 states. As a by-product, cases of diabetes and the costs of health care are high, along with premature deaths.

In 24/7 Wall St.’s “States With the Highest Obesity Rates,” the study’s authors summed up the Mississippi statistics:

Mississippi
> Obesity rate: 35.3%
> Pct. diabetic: 12.5% (the highest)
> Annual per capita health care cost: $10,507 (4th highest)
> Premature deaths per 100,000: 487.0 (the highest)

Incidentally, nine of the 10 most obese states are in the south: Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma.

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The methodology:

To identify the states with the highest obesity rates, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the percentage of adults in each state with a body mass index (BMI) of 30.0 or higher — people with BMI values over this threshold are considered obese. Data came from County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute joint program. The percentage of adults who have been diagnosed with diabetes, the number of deaths before age 75 per 100,000 people in a given year (the premature death rate), as well as annual health care costs also came from County Health Rankings and Roadmaps. Annual health care costs are based on the amount of price-adjusted medicare reimbursements per enrollee, a widely used approximation of per capita health care costs in a population. All data is as of the most recent period available.

See how the numbers shake out for all 50 states.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.