Study agrees: You are what you eat

March 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

You are what your state eats — or, more precisely, whatever health habits it promotes, prohibits, encourages or chooses to fund.

That is the premise of a recently published study out of the University of Illinois that seeks to answer the question: How hazardous is your state to your health?

Ohio landed in the middle of the pack on this scale. It was ranked 32nd most hazardous to its residents’ health of the 50 states

Thomas O’Rourke, professor emeritus of community health, conceived the research as a response to a study last year that measured states on the degree of freedom they afforded their residents.

That study, out of the Mercatus Center at George Washington University, ranked states based on a wide-ranging index of factors viewed from an individual rights perspective.

The less a state restricted where you could carry a gun, who you could marry or how helmeted or strapped in you had to be while driving or cycling, for example, the better. Ohio ranked 38th out of 50 states on the freedom scale.

O’Rourke thought there was another way to look at government intervention. In an era when Big Government is being demonized as part of the national health-care debate and criticized through the burgeoning tea-party movement, his study looked at the potential health benefits of the government’s telling us what to do.

The study looked at 25 variables — viewing as good things factors such as high beer and cigarette taxes, mandatory physical education classes, low speed limits and tough gun, child-care and environmental restrictions. It also gave better marks to states that invested more in parks and recreation, schools and public assistance.