We are number 1!! (Shreveport, Bossier City, Jackson: low income, 2015, crime)

[Dr Dough]

From the Shreveport Times:

"A recent WalletHub survey ranked Shreveport-Bossier City as having the nation’s biggest weight problem.

WalletHub examined 100 of the most populated U.S. metro areas with 12 key metrics. Those metrics included the percentage of adults and high school students who are obese and the percentage of people who are physically inactive.

A ranking of 1 was the best with 50 being average and 100 being the worst.

Among the ugly numbers for Shreveport-Bossier City.
• Shreveport-Bossier City ranked 99th in percentage of adults who are obese.
• Shreveport-Bossier City ranked 94th in percentage of residents who are physically inactive.
• Shreveport-Bossier City ranked 85th in residents with high cholesterol.
• Shreveport-Bossier City ranked 87th in percentage of adults eating less than five servings of fruits/vegetables per day
• Shreveport-Bossier City ranked 95th in percentage of residents with high blood pressure."

www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/2015/03/02/shreveport-nations-top-weight-problem/24261197/


Hey Shreveport/Bossier lets go do some burpees.

[Chance and Change]

Add this in the mix
Study finds Shreveport saddest city, LA saddest state - KSLA News 12 Shreveport, Louisiana News Weather & Sports

Now, how do you go from these levels and conditions to a positive shift? I don't know if we collectively have what it takes to make the transistion to remove ourselves from these summations.

Everything is on choke down, we don't even stop to try and understand why crime is high. We just put labels on it and denegrate people, because that is the mentality within the region. It's the mentality in Business, be it Civic related public business or private business. We take pride in denigration of individuals, groups, ethnicities and anything else we can diminish with negative summation, without ever looking at the driving conditions which set the stage for this madness.

Jobs is a big issues, when the area is comprised of fast food, clerk and other low pay jobs, poverty increases, and no where in the nations does education prosper when poverty dominates the spectrum. No country or place on the planet has ever seen education flourish where poverty is dominant.

We focus on the wrong things. We don't know how to be a city which produces a %of what it consumes, we lost the ability to be industrious. We can barely find local grown foods, except at the short lived, limited time "Farmers Market".
We can't even find local organically fed meat products in the stores. We are not known for "building any wide spread /domestically utilized products, and now we don't even have a rating of being a support supplier to any industry.
We have not true 'Tech Community", and today with the advance of technology, no city which ignores to develop a tech community will prosper with clarity and acknowledgment as a progressing locality.
We don't understand or grasp that aspect.
The worst part is we act like we don't care, the few who make a good income, have ego's that seperate them in broad distance from the challenged, even those who are in the middle of trying to make it and economically strapped but working; They are not promoted or even considered, because the people who are paid well, take too much pride in having a 'wide pay rate gap", to them it makes them special.
So they (the well to do) are not interested in seeing anyone else prosper, because they (the well to do) won't feel special anymore, (It's that old slave and slaver mentality)..
After all these decades, it is still reverberating in the mentalities of people and it hold all of us as a collective of people back.
Ultimately, they (the well to do) become too ignorant to understanding, that true prospering of any city is only engaged when all are able to prosper and be acknowledged for their contribution.The South, has a very big problem with learning this paradigm shift in how to think and grow and prosper.

We have such a mental crippling of segregationist lusting, until it functions across all categories, not just races but within races, poor whites are put down by well to do whites, poor blacks put down by well to do blacks, well to do whites put down poor blacks, and well to do blacks put down poor whites.... and the cycle is the same. Bigotry and Ignorance and Economic Bias.
We don't care to think... it's 'get mine, if it means shoving your face in the mud, and kicking you if you slip and fall. It's a mentality sickness.... YET, THIS AREA CLAIMS TO BE "SO" RELIGIOUS. That is a situations, which clergy fails to address. They are more worried about what the tithes and contributions are, and if they can gain popularity, so these things become matterless to a great many who claim to head some of these organizations.
People will go to Church on Sunday, and Talk about how God Centered they are, and knife you in the back or push you down if it benefits their ego and vanity of sorts. It's pure INSANITY.



Well on the WEIGHT AND OBESITY MATTERS:
We have some of the craziest weather, which is a generalized deterrent to pro-active outdoors activities which translate into exercies and caloric burning activity. We "Eat" foods" trying to be some Southern Old Style City, which are loaded with Calories, "Fried Foods, with massive amounts of Cheese and this or that... pushed as being "Southern Flavor"... and what Southern Flavor produces is, OBESITY.
"MANAGING "intake portions" does not exist !!!!!! We still have that, delusional " hearty southern appetite mentality".

Convenience stores make a fortune selling sugary drinks and high caloric snacks, and they are in the 24/7 business of making an enormous profit from these sales.

Don't know if we can change the trends......

[JWG223]

I used to live there, and agree with the study from a "boots on the ground" perspective. It was always depressing coming home and seeing people that look like that as opposed to wherever I had gone on vacation/business/etc.

[Chance and Change]

I don't think these studies impact the minds of those who may need to acknowledge these conditions. It's evident there are many people who do not pursue fourms to read or write, therefore it escapes many peoples awareness.

I don't know what kind of outreach this program does to attract people in the many locations they feature in their list of cities and topic categories. But even when it comes to local internet news sites, there is a deficit of commentary contributors.

We've become a society advanced in having these tools, but we still lag in people expanding beyond the commonality of Facebook and Twitter. Even some web news portals do get utilizations, but what I've seen is a great many of the comments are by Right Wingers. As they can take a story which has nothing to do with President and they are obsessive with injecting some Desparaging Obama remark.

As the article this post represents, I don't think its likely that many of the people who fit the obese category will venture to engage this topic.

We have a youth population across ethnic demographics who are very much over-weight and many have hit the mark of obesity.
I do wonder if the school system has acknowledged the article and brought it up as subject matter students can engage and discuss.

[golden eagles fan]

Being over here in Jackson, I didn't know Shreveport had it that bad. We've always been at or near the top of unhealthiest states in the nation. But you have to understand that this is the South. It's our traditional southern food that has many of us in the condition we're in. I don't have an issue with weight, but am having blood pressure issues (which I'm working on to improve). I believe people need to be educated on the foods they eat and how much of the good and bad stuff they contain. I'm learning first-hand after finding out how dangerously high my BP was. I made the decision to cut out the fried food, fast food and processed lunches. I also put in more fruits & veggies and exercising more.

What may also be an issue is that eating healthier costs more. I went to the grocery store last night and it costs more to buy an avocado than it does a double cheeseburger at McDonald's. In many poorer areas, you don't see as many grocery stores, but plenty of cheaper but unhealthy fast-food joints like McDonald's, KFC and Church's. if people can't afford healthier foods, they surely won't join a gym.

[hdwell]

It's as simple as this: When Shreveport and Jackson decide to join the new South and leave behind their old south proclivity then you will start to see things change. That will take nothing short of a miracle.

[Chance and Change]

It takes good governance and the community - I visited a city in California, south of Pasadena, in the very well to do areas, which the only fried chicken was at KFC, there were not a lot of other types of fast foods, other than Eateries that sold various ethnic specialty dishes. These were not drive up fast foods, you actually had to go inside. There was a limit on the height of advertisement signs, and the streets had nice maintained trees along its sidewalks, the area where the homes exist had extra wide streets and the houses were like a super-sized version of traditional ranch-style designs.
Everything indicates this is high education and high income communities who have long known that these things are not healthy.
The irony in this is, It speculatively is likely, these are the same income level residents who have money to invest in things like fast food joints stocks and may even own some of the franchises, as long as its not in their neighborhood.

Poor people communities are less likely to invest in the stocks of these eateries, but they are relied upon to be the patrons who bring their money to the counter inside and purchase these products.

There was a big push years ago, on the west cost and we see it in some communities in the south, they have limits on the number of liquor stores allowed in communities and some communities have no high number of liquor stores.

The cost today of fruits is prohibitively high, the sadder part is the stores end up tossing this stuff out, from spoilage, rather than lower the prices and sell all of it. but they get the tax write off for spoilage which may provide more profit benefit than lowering the cost and actually selling this stuff to people.

[JWG223]

Originally Posted by Chance and Change

I don't think these studies impact the minds of those who may need to acknowledge these conditions. It's evident there are many people who do not pursue fourms to read or write, therefore it escapes many peoples awareness.
Of course not. If a mirror, an MD visit, a child's pointing and laughter, struggling to get around, etc. won't do it, what makes anyone thing something written on the internet would?

I don't know what kind of outreach this program does to attract people in the many locations they feature in their list of cities and topic categories. But even when it comes to local internet news sites, there is a deficit of commentary contributors.

We've become a society advanced in having these tools, but we still lag in people expanding beyond the commonality of Facebook and Twitter. Even some web news portals do get utilizations, but what I've seen is a great many of the comments are by Right Wingers. As they can take a story which has nothing to do with President and they are obsessive with injecting some Desparaging Obama remark.

As the article this post represents, I don't think its likely that many of the people who fit the obese category will venture to engage this topic.

We have a youth population across ethnic demographics who are very much over-weight and many have hit the mark of obesity.
I do wonder if the school system has acknowledged the article and brought it up as subject matter students can engage and discuss.

It is what it is. Shreveport encourages sloth and obesity follows.

A lot of it has to do with the mindset, people who don't care live there, and people who do care, move. So you get a concentration of sloth, for the most part.

It's kindof how attractive people always tend to stick together, more or less, in their social circles, and unattractive people do the same.

Really though, we have hit "natural selection" on topics like this. What we have, is this:

Not everyone is worthless. Not everyone is amazing and perfect. Most people fall somewhere between the two, by varying degrees.

We can see this in wolf-packs, baboon troops, and every other form of higher functioning animal social circles. What you are proposing, is that every person be the Alpha male/female. EVERY. It just won't work. People aren't all Alphas. Then what you have is the natural flow of "like seeking like". That harkens to the top part of my post. Shreveport just isn't the typical Alpha's territory. I met a few while I was there for sure, and the only reason they were there was because they were devoted to their careers, which were there, for the time being, or they had family and endured their surroundings for the sake of their loved one's.

You can't make everyone awesome. Some areas just are what they are. It would be like striving for peace in the Middle East....hasn't happened for centuries. Won't happen now. Can't happen.

But I'm sure it feels noble to try.


*It's not money. It's dedication and drive. I was a broke as hell college student and managed to pass my classes, and maintain 9-11% body-fat during the last few years of my college career. Don't blame the price of fruit or height of advertising signs or "community leaders" or any of that crap. That's the mentality that makes Shreveport the dump it is "I'm not to blame! Someone else is!!!" ROFLMAO! Keep thinking that. Keep coming up short (and round, lol!)

[Chance and Change]

I don't think people need to try and look like the carefully selected images on TV, nor the look of those who have sat in the makeup artist chair for hours and have a crew of people primping them at every step.

I'm talking about PLAIN AND SIMPLE HEALTH of people in their everyday living.

Without health there is not much of anything a person can do. As we get older, it becomes more and more up front as to the concerns about health. Every Decade brings us into new realizations about the value of health.

I don't think people run around with a "I'm not to blame", or "someone do it for me"... that's really an old and worn out phrase that has been used in a variety of prejudgmental aims.

Our society does not predominantly promote health.. What we get is advertisements selling pills and other medications, all the while they feature older people in pretentious situations.
The next thing we get is commercials, promoting fast foods or snacks and eateries with images of plates full of food, with enough content on the plate to make two days of servings.
We get car commercials, but not much in the ways of physical exercise type daily doings. Even our TV shows, are crass sitcoms with nutty scripts, or movies about mayhem and madness of every sort. Then comes the 'bicker fest" known as Reality Shows. Not only is it not physically healthy, it is not mentally healty. when mental health declines or is negatively affected, then physical health becomes diminished into a variety of maladies.

There is a great deal that contributes to the dsyfunction. Even today, between cell phone, texting, facebook and twitter, dominates the spectrum of social communications, until people don't physically get out and visit and do stuff to the degree they could.

Then comes the big kicker - Poor Income Standards. It is a well demonstrated fact that people in the upper income levels who have disposable income, engage a variety of outdoors activities. People with Poor Income Standards have a lesser engagement of outdoors activities and even lesser view of options to select among. As a variety of things may even become cost prohibitive within the perception as well as the conditions of low income standards bring.

I think if this region had more industry and more small business of a variety of types, it would greatly improve the overall atomsphere in ways that could help transform us in many positive ways.

When limits of opportunity, low income and all the challenges in the economic spectrum is present, the esteem level is impacted negatively, disenchantment increases and the tonality of positivity diminishes.

It's a package deal of many things which is part of what makes for a healthy and vibrant community. We are not beyond this collection of things gaining positivity... But as with society and life of individuals, it takes positivity in all areas of all leadership position holders, be it public, private, social, community and households.

I'd like to know how does "single parent households" impact what is obesity" and how does that factor into the equation across these regions where obesity is high. Equally so, how does household disunity, abuse and lack of positive inspirations impact what becomes conditions of obesity in various areas.

I think its a valid inquiry, because in some very well to areas, the obesity factor is far less than it is in the poor and working poor areas of the same city model, which is relative to similar conditions in various states.

[Phil75230]

Did the researchers include Bossier City, Haughton, Keithville, etc. in the results? If not, then at best this only indicates what the city itself is like.