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Opinion L.A.

Opinion: Mirror, mirror: Who’s the healthiest county of us all?

By Karin Klein
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Orange County is the healthiest county in the Southland; Los Angeles comes in at a mediocre 26th and San Bernardino an abysmal 45th. If you’re a fan of rankings, you’ll love the new county-by-county health scores from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Its statistics go far beyond the maps recently released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, ranking each county on a wide range of health-related demographics--mortality rates, quality of life, high school graduation rates (yes, education correlates to lifespan), unemployment, obesity and air quality.

Marin County, which already came out looking good on the CDC’s ratings of exercise and obesity rates, ranks No. 1 in California, while Del Norte County comes in last. (A couple of counties weren’t ranked.) Bay Area counties tended to do well; the most rural counties were pooled at the bottom.

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Not that you should make decisions about your next house based on these; they’re simply a demographic snapshot. While some aspects of a healthy life can’t be controlled by individuals -- such as smog -- exercise and education are more a matter of individual choice. As a society, we tend to overrate ratings.

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--Karin Klein

Opinion L.A.
Karin Klein

Karin Klein is a former Los Angeles Times board member who wrote editorials about education, environment, food and science. She was the 2006-07 winner of the Eugene C. Pulliam Fellowship for Editorial Writers and was a 2012 and 2014 Logan Environmental Journalism fellow and a 2014 Metcalf Environmental Reporting fellow. She is the author of the 2010 book “50 Hikes in Orange County.” Klein attended Wellesley College and UC Berkeley.

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