Mike Oliver debunks a common misconception about the South:
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 reason the myth has persisted? Southerners lie less:
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. … [R]esearchers found that most everyone fudges, or underreports, their weight when asked on a telephone. Turns out that Southerners fudge less, he said.
The Dish 