Healthy cities?

Vegetarian Times, Oct, 2004

If you see your city on a list of the nation's "healthiest," curb your enthusiasm. Such rankings, which appear in newspapers and magazines, are not as reliable as they might seem, say researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most, the CDC study says, suffer from "a lack of scientific support" The report, in the April 1, 2004 issue of The American Journal of Public Health, notes that such lists are often cobbled together in such a haphazard fashion as to grossly distort outcomes.

Sometimes data is gathered from different time periods, which can also result in misleading findings. Data on obesity collected in the early 1990s, for example, before obesity rates increased, cannot be compared with more recent data. "Finally," the Health Behavior News Service reports, "while it's easy to group the best or worst two or three cities using these indicators" the scores from communities that fall somewhere between extremes "are often statistically indistinguishable from each other, leaving most towns in a meaningless limbo."