Are Jobless People Fat?

Last week, we highlighted a scary county-by-county map that a commenter posted to #tips showing metastasizing unemployment growth.

Today, it occurred to us that we’d seen a graphic like that somewhere before: A CDC map of obesity by county.

The left map is a snapshot of county-level unemployment rates from October 2008; darker counties have higher unemployment (the time-lapse map we grabbed it from goes to October 2009, at which point the whole country is basically black).

At the right is a CDC map released last month of obesity rates in 2007—it’s the first county-level rendering of obesity data.

(You can click the maps to see a larger version.) Read more