[quote]BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- The South often gets tagged with having the most obese population. But it doesn't appear to be true, a University of Alabama at Birmingham study suggests. The study recently published in the journal Obesity found that there's a significantly higher percentage of obese people in a region of central and northwest states including Minnesota, Kansas and North and South Dakota. . . . The notion that the South is the fattest comes primarily from a nationwide telephone survey done by the Centers for Disease Control, in which the surveyor asks for height and weight, among other things, Howard said. That survey, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), shows the South as the most obese, with Mississippi and Alabama, the number one and two fattest states respectively. But the UAB researchers found that when people were actually weighed, the numbers didn't add up. Mississippi was fourth and Alabama was in the middle of the pack, Howard said. [/quote] It's laughable that in this age of self-image obsession, that the CDC thinks a phone survey about weight is an accurate method. They should really know better.