How healthy does your city eat?
Ever wonder how healthy are your eating habits compared to others?
Gallup recently published the results of a wellness survey conducted across 189 US cities in all 50 states from more than 350,000 adults that may help us answer that question.
The results tallied the percentage of people in the surveyed US cities who answered “yes” to the question “Did you eat healthy yesterday?”
Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, Florida took the top spot with an impressive 75.3 percent of self-identified healthy eating. Not far behind was Barnstable, Massachusetts with 75.1 percent healthy eaters. The rest of the top 10 cities are ranked as follows:
- Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, Florida: 75.3
- Barnstable Town, Massachusetts: 75.1
- Santa Cruz-Watsonville, California: 74.2
- Salinas, California: 72.9
- McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas: 72.4
- Santa Rosa, California: 72.3
- Hilton Head Island-Bluffton-Beaufort, South Carolina: 72.0
- San Luis Obixpo-Paso Robles-Arroyo Grande, California: 72.0
- Lake Havasu City-Kingman, Arizona: 71.0
- El Paso, Texas: 70.9
Being the birth place of all diet and health trends, California occupied five of the top ten spots on the list. Texas also showed up, claiming two of the ten coveted top spots.
However, not all interviewees were as confident about what they had been piling into their mouths. Towards the bottom of the ranking, there were 30 cities with less than 60 percent of interviewees responded positively to eating healthy. At the last spot on the list, Lubbock, Texas only had 53.8 percent healthy eaters which was more than 20 points lower than some of the healthiest cities in the US.
Some food for thought:
To be honest, even at last place, the 53.8 percent healthy eating seems high for any US community. After all, everyone has different standards for what is healthy and it is impossible to accurately capture these difference with one simple question.
With that said, the survey still provided an interesting basis for comparison.