This month the United Health Foundation and America’s Health Rankings released their annual report of America’s healthiest states rankings. The healthiest state in 2013 was Hawaii, which edged out long time leader Vermont.
There was some good news for 2013. According to the report Americans made considerable progress in their overall health in 2013. This was also the first year since 1998 that America’s obesity stats did not get worse. However, there is only so much good news in this. America’s obesity rate was about the same as last year, at 27.6 percent of the adult population — marking the first time since 1998 that America did not get worse in this key metric. It didn’t fall, but at least it didn’t go up.
Other key findings noted that among the adult population smoking rates dropped from 21.2 percent to 19.6 percent, and rates of physical inactivity dropped from 26.2 percent to 22.9 percent.