In the spirit of Gapminder, Washington Post created an interactive scatterplot viewer that’s using alpha channel to tell apart overlapping fat dots better than sorting-by-circle-size Gapminder is using:
Good news: the rate of fattening of the USA appears to be slowing down. Maybe because of high gas prices? But what’s happening with Oceania?
There must be something wrong with the Britain data, right? I was under the impression they were heading the way of the US and Australia. In the data here, the UK has the trimmest men and women in Europe, but as far as I know, Britain has the worst BMI in Western Europe.
An interesting fact you can't see here is the state-by-state breakdown. The slimmest state in the US today (Colorado) has a higher average BMI than the fattest state 20 years ago (WV, I believe). That's mind-blowing.
Yes, there is something wrong with the British data — have look at the original data source http://www5.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/metabolic_ris… where they also have a nifty visualization. British males average 27.4 BMI in 2008.
Also, since when was there a country called Britain?