In 2008, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called Huntington, W.Va., the fattest city in America. The story was national news, a cautionary tale for a country whose waistline seemed to expand a bit more each year.
Soon Jamie Oliver, the British celebrity chef, helicoptered in to film a new reality show, “Food Revolution,” in which he attempted to teach Huntingtonians how to improve their diet. The show was full of manufactured drama: Oliver told a weeping mother she was killing her kids with junk food, took a skeptic to the mortuary to show him the surge in double-wide coffins and dropped his jaw at a class full of elementary school students who couldn’t identify a
tomato. Viewers gawked; “Food Revolution” won an Emmy.
In the decade since, Huntington has made news for its opioid problem, but what about its diet? The CDC’s latest metropolitan health survey found that the city’s rate of obesity among adults had dropped a whopping 13 points, from 45.5 to 32.6 percent, even as the overall rate in West Virginia remained the highest in the nation. Huntington was no longer America’s fattest city. What happened in Huntington, a city of 47,000 at the intersection of the Rust Belt
and Appalachia, offers important lessons for how the nation deals with its obesity problem — which today afflicts nearly 40 percent of adults and 1 in 6 children...READ MORE
