Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fattest of them all?

HEY, lard-ass! No, not you, Cheesehead: Wisconsin isn't even in the top ten when it comes to obese state populations.

For the third year in a row, Mississippi has been named the fattest state, while Colorado again is the thinnest.

Wisconsin? Why, despite our love of beer and cheese -- and the calories they contain -- we're right smack dab in the middle: No. 26, in fact, with only 25.6% of our population obese, and only 62.3% obese or overweight. Last year, we were 22nd. Mississippi comes in (Burp!) with 32.6% obese and 68.1% obese or overweight. Only 19.3% of those skinny Coloradans are obese, and only 55.7% obese or overweight.

These computations come from an analysis by CalorieLab, Inc., based on the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System database maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rankings use a three-year average in order to smooth out statistical fluctuations.

The full report can be found HERE. Grab a six-pack, some Big Macs and a few bags of pretzels and chew on ... the data.

In another study, by the way, Forbes magazine named Milwaukee the 9th most junk-food obsessed city, of 52 metropolitan areas, ranked by Category Development Index (CDI), "which is the percentage of category sales in a market divided by the percentage of all commodity volume for a market, times 100. An index between 80 and 120 is generally considered average ... and blah blah blah." In layman's terms: they count how much junk food we buy from supermarkets.

The magazine said of our neighbor to the north:

Pizza is a favorite in many markets--out of 52, 18 have an above-average CDI--but Milwaukee reigns as the frozen pizza capital of the country, with a CDI of 244, about 2.5 times the average. Maybe that's because pizza goes so well with beer, particularly Pabst, Schlitz and Miller, which are all brewed in the area.

Forbes' story is HERE, and brief explanations of who overeats what, where is here.

And if you're still hungry for information on this topic, here's an article listing Men's Fitness magazine's rankings of the fattest and the fittest cities.