Q: Which state ranks as the healthiest in the nation for 2014?
We know this is your first question every year, so we won’t keep you in suspense: Hawaii took the number one spot. Did you know that for the full 25 years we’ve been doing this report—since 1990—Hawaii has always ranked as one of the top six healthiest states in the nation? Perhaps it’s time we all booked a flight to the islands to see what we can learn from Hawaiians about healthy living! To see where your state ranks this year, visit www.americashealthrankings.org.
When we look beyond the individual states, the 2014 edition of United Health Foundation’s America’s Health Rankings® shows that as a whole, Americans continued to make progress on several health metrics in 2014, but unfortunately, serious challenges persist. Of particular concern is the fact that obesity and physical inactivity rates are up again this year. Obesity increased 7 percent—29.4 percent of adults are now obese—while physical inactivity increased 3 percent, which means 23.5 percent of U.S. adults did not participate in any physical activity outside of their job in the last 30 days.
The good news? Americans continue to improve in some areas: smoking again declined this year, this time by 3 percent, and immunization coverage for adolescents increased by 5 percent.
What’s unique about this year is it marks our 25th edition, an exciting opportunity to look back at 25 years of state health statistics and see the big picture of health statistics in America. This is what we saw: we’ve been enormously successful in treating illnesses, but we have a lot of work left to do in building environments that let people make healthy choices and motivating and enabling people to live healthier lives.
Our country made notable improvements in life expectancy and decreases in cardiovascular and cancer deaths since 1990. However, despite continuing improvements in access to medical care and better pharmaceuticals, rates for conditions like high blood pressure and cholesterol have been consistently increasing—or at best holding steady—since 1996. Physical inactivity rates and obesity have also risen—obesity rates alone increased by 153 percent over the last 25 years.
However, we know that when we put our minds to it, Americans are capable of tackling big health challenges. Just look at smoking: we saw a 36 percent decrease in cigarette smoking during the past 25 years, which shows it is possible to for us to make big changes for the better!
As always, we see this report as “A Call to Action for individuals and Their Communities.” In the next 25 years, we want to help people and their communities live healthier, to manage their current conditions and to make health decisions that will avert the development of preventable chronic illnesses. We all have a role to play in this, and we look forward to continuing on the journey toward a healthier America with you.