umemployement vs obesity

I’ve done my fair amount of travelling in these parts of the country and have met many guys who will tell you with pride that they wouldn’t walk to the post-box in the front of their lawn and just wait till they are driving by to get out. These are the kinds of guys who laugh at somebody like me who will run a marathon and say that they get tired when they drive 26 miles. I know people take pride in all sorts of things but to take pride in your own laziness is just disgusting. Laziness and Obesity are probably related although there probably isn’t a perfect 1-1 correlation but I’m sure it’s pretty close. There aren’t many times when you see a guy whose 100 pounds overweight also busting his ass.

A regular TOR reader sent me the following chart from Gawker.com which basically compares the obesity rate vs. the unemployment rate and find that there is a striking correlation especially in the Southeast and the Rust-Belt.

This week, we highlighted a scary county-by-county map that a commenter posted to #tips showing metastasizing unemployment growth. Today, it occurred to us that we'd seen a graphic like that somewhere before: A CDC map of obesity by county.



The left map is a snapshot of county-level unemployment rates from October 2008; darker counties have higher unemployment (the time-lapse map we grabbed it from goes to October 2009, at which point the whole country is basically black). At the right is a CDC map released last month of obesity rates in 2007—it's the first county-level rendering of obesity data. (You can click the maps to see a larger version.)


With the exception of the West Coast, it looks as though Ground Zero of the employment crash aligned fairly faithfully with the Obesity Belt: Appalachia, Michigan, the Deep South and the Southeast Atlantic Coast all shared early unemployment spikes and higher rates of obesity, while Texas, the Upper Midwest, and the plains states are thinner and have better job security

Now Gawker.com only views data while TOR analyzes it and I can tell you that unemployment has hit people of all demographics but staying unemployed may very well have something to do with being too lazy to really go find other work. I know something about myself and that is if I ever find myself out of work, I’ll be the first guy ready to find a job washing dishes, cleaning gutters or doing male porn but I also consider myself the furthers thing from lazy. I know unemployment is through the roof and there aren’t a lot of good jobs out there but I also know that both my brother and sister-in-law got good jobs during the recession.

Maybe it’s not all about hard-work and drive, maybe it’s because people who are 150lbs overweight are also un-presentable, and we know people have a bias against the obese people.   I have to think that if you show up to a job interview with ketchup on your shirt and your shirt undone, chances are they'll show you to the Dunkin Donuts across the street before they show you a new office.