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I agree completely that I understated that population-level difference by far too much! Having had a travel-heavy job that took me to quite a few parts of the country, this difference is really, really obvious. The reddest part of the country have a lot of what I've heard people refer to as "Walmart obesity". In stark contrast, the fittest places I've been aren't just blue, they're so blue that they're stereotypes, literally the punch lines for jokes - Eugene, Madison, Boulder.
There isn't a great explanation that I'm aware of, but my working hypothesis is that it just really does turn out that the Blue Tribers are correct about built environment massively influencing how people interface with the world. What do the three places I just mentioned have in common? Huge numbers of bike trails, hiking trails, running trails, parks, climbing gyms, and so on. These opporunities and cultural reinforcement drive behavior. If we want to test that by hunting for a Red place with similar surroundings, the best place that I can think of to check is Utah, and sure enough, Utahans are an unusually healthy group. There are obvious confounders in Utah, but it's a start anyway.
Utahan food is also a thing people prefer not to think about. Southern food is both generally loved and unusually calorie dense.
Really? This was the first article I found on DDG about Utah cuisine, and a lot of it not only looks decent, it looks not unlike Southern food. Granted, this is some listicle from some website I've never heard of before, so all the caveats about blogsites in the age of ChatGPT apply.
Round these parts, that's called pink sauce. It's a bastardised version of Marie Rose sauce. It may be a "Utah thing", but they didn't invent it.
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Isn't selection bias the most obvious explanation? Like how it tends to be the explanation for everything in education, and looking for "successful educational practices" without carefully controlling for it just tells you the educational fads in the most-selective schools.
Being normal weight correlates with traits, like intelligence and conscientiousness, that are also useful for succeeding in the educational system and getting high-status jobs. (Not always high-paying jobs, but that's because so many people want those jobs that there's competition driving down wages.) People move to the areas where those jobs are available, and they have children who inherit those traits. Left-wing ideology is popular among the educated/upper-class, so those areas are also left-wing.
This also tangentially relates to the recent blog posts about conservatism's human-capital problem, TracingWoodgrain's The Republican Party is Doomed and Hanania's Coping with Low Human Capital.
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I'm reminded of the phenomenon of the "luxury belief," where people espouse beliefs while being shielded from the consequences of those beliefs. The types of people self-motivated enough to move into cities and pursue an education or elite career also tend to be self-motivated enough to keep themselves fit, and so the message that there's nothing wrong with being fat or unfit doesn't really affect them. But others don't have such self-motivation and take the message seriously, resulting in the current Healthy At Every Size and fatness acceptance movements and the consequential early deaths. That said, it's not as if Red Tribe folks particularly listen to the Blue Tribe in this kind of messaging, and so that doesn't explain why Red Tribe tends to have many more fatter people than the Blue Tribe.
I do wonder how the differences would be if we controlled for intelligence or socioeconomic status. Certainly I see plenty of obese people in my everyday life in my blue tribe enclave, but they generally tend to be in the lower classes. It could be primarily a class divide, where the Blue Tribe's most visible members are on the upper end while being left/liberal and the Red Tribe's most visible members are on the lower end while being right/conservative.
And to spitball, there are some just-so stories that come to mind. Left/liberal is more associated with marrying later or not at all as well as being more willing to divorce, which puts greater pressure on individuals to be and stay fit longer. It's also more associated with lack of a belief in the afterlife, which would create greater pressure on keeping alive and healthy. It's also more associated with colleges, which in the USA means more opportunities for athletics. It's also more associated with postmodernism, which would allow for a greater disconnect between one's actions and one's beliefs, as well as a greater disconnect between one's beliefs and reality.
I think there’s a bit of bias toward “everyone is just like me” belief as well. If you and everyone you know are high achieving type A personalities who make time to work out, it’s not that hard to reason yourself to the conclusion that everyone is like that and simply lacks some sort of environmental helps that would make them successful. If I made it because of hard work, and everyone works hard, you must have some extra problems that I don’t have or you’d make it too.
Personally I think both can be true and in fact are true. There can be things like lack of money, exposure to ideas that you could use to build a great future, IQ, supportive familles, race , or even geographical proximity that can radically change your life prospects. But I don’t think that negates work. It’s not either or, it’s both and all of the above. What I see the left making the mistake on is that they think the existence of environmental or biological factors somehow means not having to work hard as well. I see systemic racism narratives as something poisonous to black people in so far as it convinced them to not bother to try.
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When I lived in Eugene for a few months in 2008, it certainly didn't seem to be particularly fatter than any comparable European city, save that there were slightly more of morbidly obese megafatties going around.
When the left talks about fatness being caused by society rather than the individual, well, one of the things is what the society might be able to do to try to get people be more athletic, such as the cities maintaining bike trails, hiking trails, running trails, parks and climbing gyms. They don't just spring out from thin air, after all - I guess that there would be a possibiliy for private ones, too (climbing gyms, certainly), but the others are a pretty classic case of things that localities do on public money.
When the right bangs on about private responsibility, it is, on one hand, just phrasing something that is self-evident and, on the other hand, does not seem to have the required effect; you just get fatties who recognize they're fundamentally at fault for their fatness, and then... just keep on being fat, as a group (obviously there are numerous individual cases where getting some tough love helps make life choices).
Which is why I think, inasmuch as we aren't going to eliminate deductions and go to a flat tax, we should have tax deductions for fitness and sporting expenses and equipment. For the simple reason that these are good things that we want to encourage.
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They were intended as an example of one of the healthy cities, not the fat cities! And yeah, those fit cities still have the weird morphology of Amerifats that simply doesn't exist in Europe to any appreciable degree. The median is just much more similar to a normal European city and the athletic and fit tail of the distribution is both wide and long.
I certainly prefer the Blue environments in terms of the buildout, that's why I selected one to live in. If I had my druthers, my city would continue to improve multiuse paths and cycling infrastructure while implementing more and more traffic-calming to slow the speed of vehicles. At the end of the day, I prefer the Blue policy solutions to obesity and the Red messaging on obesity.
Just to be clear, I didn't try to imply it was a fat city - just commented on the basis of my own experience.
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