CalorieLab
US obesity by state using the CalorieLab fs2010 scheme
CalorieLab.com is a site offering health news and nutritional and fitness reference information. Each year they publish a map summarising obesity levels by state in using an easy to understand safety/danger scale.
CalorieLab write:
The idea with the color scheme is to show the overall pattern at a glance, intuitively, without requiring that the viewer pay much attention to the legend key.
The basic hue is orange, which is between “danger” red and “safe” green. Yellow doesn't lend itself as well to a gradation because of its light value. Within orange we have four levels from a tint to a shade. More levels than that and adjacent colors would not be distinguishable. We eaked out a fifth level by using a green tint for the healthiest states, which is something we want to emphasize anyway. The thinnest state is in a more saturated green, and the fattest in a saturated red. The legend shows that each color covers about 2 percent of the BMI (the two ends are not exactly 2 percent).
We have to move the scale 1 percent to the right every year, because that's the rate that the U.S. is getting fatter at. We want an approximately equal number of states in each color band. Changing the scale each year unfortunately means that consecutive annual maps cannot be directly compared. The two outlying states are shown in the legend key at a distance from the ends of the other colors in the scale which corresponds to the distance that their average BMI is removed from the second thinnest/fattest state (there's quite a jump).
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