This doesn't have to do with smoking, but this article is on a new survey from the anti-smoker CDC.

Please note that while CDC admits this kind of study is crap, the story is about their latest results.

Please also note that a much better survey was done by CDC just one year earlier.

Besides wasting money on studies known to give wrong numbers, I have to wonder why the government feels it needs to weigh us? I don't really know, but my first thought was Soylent Green.

link

ATLANTA - The South tips the scales again as the nation's fattest region, according to a new government survey.

The 2007 findings are similar to results from the same survey the three previous years.
CDC officials believe the telephone survey of 350,000 adults offers conservative estimates of obesity rates, because it's based on what respondents said about their height and weight. Men commonly overstate their height and women often lowball their weight, health experts say.

"The heavier you are, the more you underestimate your weight, probably because you don't weigh yourself as often," Dietz said.

Overall, about 26 percent of the respondents were obese, according to the study, published this week in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

A different CDC survey — a gold-standard project in which researchers actually weigh and measure survey respondents — put the adult obesity rate at 34 percent in 2005 and 2006.

I wonder what this survey cost to produce?

Think of the number of people sitting at phones asking the questions necessary? Think also about the people they were able to interview.

My vision is of the person sitting in their most comfortable chair, phone within arms reach, along with the remote control. A bag of something in their laps and crumbs down their chests. I could be wrong, it may be a bowl of something instead of a bag.

They certainly didn't reach very many people jogging, walking, swimming, or only linked to the balance of the population thru a cell phone.