Please excuse this diversion — the following post doesn’t have anything to do with what we’ve seen recently at conferences — but the post “Shrek Gets Fired” (May 23, below) opens a can of worms, and I can’t resist. In a free society where delicious food is cheap, plentiful, and heavily advertised, how should we keep children from eating themselves into a lifetime of health problems? A reader’s comment that the “Shrek” reporter is biased inspired me to try to show how huge a problem obesity really is in America. So I made a map animation (below) that shows state-by-state growth since 1985 in the proportion of adults who are obese, using data from an annual survey published by the Centers for Disease Control. The colors in the map correspond to different rates of obesity. White means no data, light blue means less than 10% of adults are obese, medium blue is 10 to 14 %, dark blue is 15-19%, yellow is 20-24%, orange is 25-29%, and red is 30% or more.

Maybe Shrek ought to do more public service ads.