Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Stereotypes True and False

So... you have all seen the studies that say the south is the most obese part of the nation right?

Turns out...  that stereotype is in fact false.

But hey I know how y'all love your generalizations... so you can rest well knowing that the same study proved one of our favorites.

Yankees lie.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yankees lie.

Cheddarman seems alright...

toothy

Nate said...

We have a word for guys like Cheds... we call them Copperheads... because "yankee" doesn't really apply.

Spacebunny said...

Part of the reason for these studies is that they are urban centered and in that respect that are likely accurate, as far as it goes. I would love to see these studies broken down by race.

Vidad said...

"I would love to see these studies broken down by race."

I was about to post the same thing.

ridip said...

After living in St. Louis for a while I'm always shocked by how much fatter people are when I run into folk from KC. Moooo! Mooooo! Damn I'd forgotten how fat western Missouri is.

Coulda told ya they get wider in the middle...

Of the country that is.

Eric said...

When I saw this over at AG, I was surprised that Josh came up with it first cause I thought I had seen it here, but it must have been at instapundit

Vidad said...

I do know that when we moved to TN I was shocked by how fat people were. My brother had the same epiphany when he moved to Georgia.

We grew up in South Florida. There, people went to the beach, ate great food and lived fit and active SWPL lifestyles.

My brother told me he felt like a god among men in Georgia. And I knew what he meant from being in TN. Pudgy, wings of fat o'er the bra straps, Baptist guts... ack.

We live in the middle of Florida right now and it's better than it was there... but not by much.

I wouldn't say it's a Southern problem... but it's certainly a problem. My wife went shopping at Walmart for some summer clothes last year. The women's section was almost all manatee-sized. We had to go elsewhere.

I'm 6' 1" and 160lbs. She's 5' 7" and 112lbs. Where the frickin' heck do we go for clothes that don't cost a fortune? I wanna pop some tags, man, but all the tags are on stretchy pants that are size 45+...

Inane Rambler said...

"We have a word for guys like Cheds... we call them Copperheads... because "yankee" doesn't really apply."

Funny, because Copperheads were Northern Democrats who wanted an end to the Civil War

Nate said...

IR

...

We know. That's why we use the name for yanks that agree with us. because it has always been used... to describe yanks who agree with us.

Susan said...

Gotta agree with Spacebunny on the study breakdown.

I figure that the conductors of the study were probably afraid of breaking their findings down because they would then leave themselves open to a charge of racism if the findings went a certain way.

Nate said...

did you guys read the articles at all? The studies showed the south as number 1.

Then they found the actual weights and that didn't match up.

turns out the yankees were lying about their weight and the southrons weren't.

WaterBoy said...

Nate: "and the southrons weren't"

No. Setting aside the sampling factor*, it only showed that fewer southrons lied.

It also showed that there are more obese southrons than in the original study, because some of them lied; less than in the North Central region, of course, but still more than was originally thought.

* The original study was a random sampling of an entire population. The measured sample was a self-selected group suffering health problems, which was then used to extrapolate to the general population. There are problems with this methodology.

Daniel said...

Watch out Nate. You are making a case for deflation here.

It only seems like Southerners are getting fatter, but they have malinvested in honesty relative to their regional peers, see?

WaterBoy said...

Correction to the above: the sampling of the REGARDS study is random, but is limited to African-American and white adults aged > or =45 years.

WaterBoy said...

So really, the only honest conclusion which can be drawn is that the Boomer generation and older -- in ALL regions of the country -- lie about their weight.

But extrapolating this to say that younger generations lie at the same rate -- rather than honestly being more physically fit -- is not valid.

Nate said...

ooooo... nice.

Its always good when we can blame shit on the boomers. we LOVE blaming shit on the boomers

WaterBoy said...

Well, that's not to say that Gen-X et al aren't also lying...just that this survey cannot make that claim based on the data.

realmatt said...

They got the statistics from telephone surveys?? How did we get the stats on fattest nations, then?