A few days ago Bloomberg had a great story about the politicization of pizza — which is part of the broader pattern in which nutrition and obesity have become deeply partisan. Big Pizza is now an industry as dedicated to the GOP as coal or tobacco.

This got me to wondering about the general association between politics and BMI; impressionistically, heaviness and redness go together, but I wanted something more systematic. So a few notes, mainly to myself.

First, yes, there is a clear correlation between obesity and Republican lean at the state level. Here’s the scatter for the 2012 election:

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There are outliers — Utah especially, but also Montana and Wyoming, of which more in a minute, but overall the relationship is really clear. At the county level, the “diabetes belt” — that’s the CDC’s term, not mine — is clearly very Republican.

An immediate question: is this all about ethnic and racial mixes? No. The CDC offers us this map of obesity rates among non-Hispanic whites:

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The pattern is still there. If anything, breaking out the ethnic groups strengthens the case for an association between politics and body mass. I thought Utah was a real outlier, very conservative but thin by American standards because of Mormonism; but if you go to the CDC source, it turns out that Utah’s low obesity rate reflects its small minority population, that non-Hispanic whites there have about the same prevalence of obesity that they do in New York, and somewhat higher than Massachusetts. That’s even more true of Montana and Wyoming.

So, junk food for thought.