Residents of Naples, Florida, are the healthiest eaters in the nation, a new poll finds.
With 75.3 percent of the residents of Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island answering "yes" to the question, "Did you eat healthy all day yesterday?", the community won the top spot in the poll, which was conducted by the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index. The same community topped the list of happiest communities in a survey from earlier this year.
Other communities that came in near the top of the list included Barnstable Town, Massachusetts (75.1 percent answered yes) and Santa Cruz-Watsonville, California (74.2 percent). [Full List: Healthy Eating in the US]
The community with the lowest rate of healthy eating was Lubbock, Texas, where just 53.8 percent of the residents said they had eaten healthy all day the previous day, according to the poll. Other communities that ranked the lowest of the 189 communities surveyed were the areas in and around Memphis, which spills across parts of Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas (55.9 percent), and the Cincinnati area, which covers parts of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana (56.3 percent).
Many of the communities with the highest rates of healthy eating were in California, with 10 of the list's top 25 communities coming from that state, according to the poll. In addition, four of the top 25 communities were in Florida, while two were in Texas and two were in Arizona.
The states at the bottom of the list were Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Louisiana, which each had three communities in the bottom 25, according to the poll, which was published today (May 3).
The researchers also looked at how the rates of healthy eating were associated with the rates of certain health conditions. For example, the investigators found that the rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol were lower in people who said that they had eaten healthy the previous day compared with people who did not say this. In addition, the rates of depression and stress were also generally lower among the healthy eaters compared with unhealthy eaters, according to the poll.
The new poll results are based on a subset of telephone interviews of more than 350,000 adults in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., done between Jan. 2, 2015, and Dec. 30, 2016.
Original article on Live Science.
