Huntington West Virginia: Obesity Epidemic Effects Half Of The Population
Huntingtons economy has withered, its poverty rate is worse than the national average, and vagrants haunt a downtown riverfront park. But this citys financial woes are not nearly as bad as its health.
Nearly half the adults in Huntingtons five-county metropolitan area are obese – an astounding percentage, far bigger than the national average in a country with a well-known weight problem.
Huntington leads in a half-dozen other illness measures, too, including heart disease and diabetes. Its even tops in the percentage of elderly people who have lost all their teeth (half of them have).
Its a sad situation, and a potential harbinger of what will happen to other U.S. communities, said Ken Thorpe, an Emory University health policy professor who is working with West Virginia officials on health reform legislation.
“They may be at the very top, but obesity and diabetes trends are very similar” in many other communities, particularly in the South, Thorpe said.
The Huntington areas health problems, cited in a U.S. health report, are a terrible distinction for the city, but the locals barely talk about it. Many dont even know how poorly the city ranks.
Culture and history are at least part of the problem, health officials say.
This city on the Ohio River is surrounded by Appalachias thinly populated hills. It has long been a blue-collar, white-skinned community – overwhelmingly people of English, Irish and German ancestry.
For decades, Huntington thrived with the coal mines to its south, as barges, trucks and trains loaded with the black fuel continually chugged into and past the city. There were plenty of manufacturing jobs in the chemical industry and in glassworks, steel and locomotive parts. Nearly 90,000 people lived in the city in 1950.
The traditional diet was heavy with fried foods, salt, gravy, sauces, and fattier meats – dense with calories burnt off through manual labor. Obesity was not a worry then. Workplace injuries were.
But as the coal industry modernized and the economy changed, manufacturing jobs left. The citys population is now fewer than 50,000, and chronic diseases – many of them connected to obesity – seem much more common.
“A lot of the patients we were seeing were getting heart attacks in their 30s. They were requiring open heart surgery in their 30s. And we were concerned because it used to be you wouldnt see heart patients come in until they were in their 50s,” Wiley said.
The Huntington area is essentially tied with a few other metro areas for proportion of people who dont exercise (31 percent), have heart disease (22 percent) and diabetes (13 percent). The smoking rate is pretty high, too, although not the worst.
However, the region is a clear-cut leader in dental problems, with nearly half the people age 65 and older saying they have lost all their natural teeth. And no other metro area comes close to Huntingtons adult obesity rate, according to the report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on data from 2006.
Perhaps fittingly, hospitals are now Huntingtons largest employers. Another is Marshall University, home of the “Thundering Herd” football team depicted in the 2006 film “We Are Marshall” which dominates local sports conversations.
The river runs along the edge of town, but its not a focal point. Marshall and one of the citys remaining factories sit to the east with several blocks of hotels and office buildings farther west. A new complex called Pullman Square – which includes a movie theater and a Starbucks – is trying to become a retail and dining center and illustrates a transition to a service economy.
Source: flroc