Huntington WV-the news is not so good

Huntington's economy has withered, its unemployment rate is worse than the national average, and vagrants haunt a downtown riverfront park. But this city's financial woes are not nearly as bad as its health.

Nearly half the adults in metropolitan Huntington are obese — an astounding percentage, far bigger than the national average in a country with a well-known weight problem.

Huntington leads in a half-dozen other illness measures, too, including heart disease and diabetes. It's even tops in the percentage of elderly people who have lost all their teeth (half of them have).

The traditional diet was heavy with fried foods, salt, gravy, sauces, and fattier meats — dense with calories burnt off through manual labor. Obesity was not a worry then. Workplace injuries were.

Huntington is essentially tied with a few other metropolitan areas for proportion of people who don't exercise (31 percent), have heart disease (22 percent) and diabetes (13 percent). The smoking rate is pretty high, too, although not the worst.

However, the Huntington area is a clear-cut leader in dental problems, with nearly half the people age 65 and older saying they have lost all their natural teeth. And no other city comes close to Huntington's adult obesity rate, according to the report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on data from 2006.

Poverty hovers, with the area rate at 19 percent, much higher than the national average. In the hilly coal fields to the South, people still live in houses or trailers with drooping, battered roofs. They stare hard at any stranger in a new car. In Huntington and its outskirts, many people think of exercise and healthy eating as luxuries.

Smoking — a common sin in West Virginia — has been hard to control, Tweel said. When the health department tried to restrict smoking in local bars and restaurants, a group of local businesses fought it all the way to the state Supreme Court. (The restrictions were upheld in 2003.) Even hospitals have fought smoking restrictions in the past, Tweel said.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,452864,00.html

Tobacco companies might as well hand out smallpox infected blankets.

they used to hand out samples in front of where I worked in 1976! They did their best to hook as many people as possible.

It wasn't confined to the poor at that time anyway. Anyone was a target.

:kick:

because I sure couldn't afford them otherwise. My friend said I could pay her back over a few weeks with the money I wasn't spending on cigarettes, and that's what I did. Many folks don't have this option available, and I remember when a cigarette was a tiny island of comfort in an unreasonable and demanding job situation.

Having a cigarette can seem like a little "reward" for just keeping on keeping on. Long-term health effects are not a big concern when you're trying to keep from losing your mind and your house in the next 24 hours.....smoking causes a wide palette of diseases but they are later and a cigarette is now.

As somebody has already pointed out, cigarettes are the one American manufactured product that cause disease and death when used EXACTLY as the manufacturer intended.

and some of my relatives do live IN Huntington

they have a marathon there, in December.

at the halfway point? Do they hand out cups of Mountain Dew instead of water? I won't even attempt to describe some of the locals in their spandex racing apparel.

I love this area, but some times it really tests my patience. I was at a CVS last night getting a prescription for my wife. It was unbelievable. The legions of the doomed were out getting their medications. It's kind of like a weekend in the Bahamas for some of them. Every last one of them was holding a bottle of Dew, had a pack of smokes nearby, and were taking a chair and a half in the waiting area. The odor was just incredible. They were a friendly bunch, however, and a good time was had by all.

My family lives all around there like I said. If golf counts then maybe half of them do exercise, if not the number drops back to the one in the survey.

Huntington is practically a bright shining beacon of cosmopolitan living compared to what surrounds it. Seriously.

with few exceptions we are seeing obesity and diabetes take over the country like a plague

And yes, I DO blame restaurants partly for this

KFC is a good example

I can put a dinner for four by the way on ten bucks... granted not fried, but I can

Wait, we don't have fried food over here. that is a luxury reserved for the rare eat out

And all the people were thin and beautiful.

My grandfather worked in a horribly dangerous industrial setting and he worked HARD.

Since then times have changed. Strangely cable TV was in WV early-like the entire family sitting around watching HBO at my grandfather's house (small town 30 minutes from Huntington) back in '78 or so.

Both plants are now closed (Kerr and Owens-Illinois). Kerr does not really exist anymore as a company, and I don't think Owens-Illinois has glass container manufacturing anymore.

The big glass manufacturer now is St. Gobain which bought out Ball which had bought out Kerr. St. Gobain is a French company. My dad was really screwed on his DB pension because of the buy outs. One of the reasons why I hate DB pensions so much and prefer DC.

The city is like night of the living dead, but it does have some nice spots (like the University). I am not really sure what is going to happen to the city in the long term without any plans for resurrecting a business base. In that it is like so many other towns.

:hi:

My family is from Milton -speaking of glass. I know some of the people trying to keep Blinko going.

My grandfather worked at the nickel plant near Pea Ridge (I think-not too sure about the geography there). Horrific accidents there, luckily he avoid that.

I usually go to one Marshall game a year and Huntington is rather different than the urban environs I have experienced. I never understood how they were able to recruit anyone to spend 4 years there if they had other options. Nice folks and all just not my cup of tea.