Your obesity source is using BRFSS. You should go directly to BRFSS, where you can get mean BMI, rather than %obesity. By county.
But BRFSS does not really have county data. It samples 400k people per year. If spread uniformly by county, that would be pretty good coverage of the 3k counties, but it weights by population and thus only lightly samples rural counties. But people want maps, which are dominated by rural counties, so it smooths out its patchy data. This produces the maps at SMTM and SSC with their sharp lines at state borders.
oh amazing, thank you. I don’t have the bandwidth to properly follow up right now but if anyone else wants to I will happily share the updated resource.
Your obesity source is using BRFSS. You should go directly to BRFSS, where you can get mean BMI, rather than %obesity. By county.
But BRFSS does not really have county data. It samples 400k people per year. If spread uniformly by county, that would be pretty good coverage of the 3k counties, but it weights by population and thus only lightly samples rural counties. But people want maps, which are dominated by rural counties, so it smooths out its patchy data. This produces the maps at SMTM and SSC with their sharp lines at state borders.
oh amazing, thank you. I don’t have the bandwidth to properly follow up right now but if anyone else wants to I will happily share the updated resource.