Montana (Not Shockingly) Ranks #2 On This Important Health List

This is fantastic news for Montana considering the influx of new people in the last few years. A characteristic of being a Montanan apparently still holds true, and it's a health win all around. Being active and getting outside is so important to overall health - we all know that.

States get ranked all the time in just about every category you can think of. Most of those lists aren't really that important or reflect anything interesting about the population of a certain state. THIS list, however, IS important and it just happens to reflect quite well on Montanans.

Montana landed near the top, #2 to be exact, of the Most Active States list, recently put out by a publication called AmericasHealthRankings.com. Their rankings for this list were "based on percentage of adults who meet federal physical activity guidelines." (These sort of rankings come out all the time and Montana is almost always near the top - it just depends on who's doing the ranking and what EXACTLY is it measuring.)

28.3% of Montana residents hit the national guidelines, where the national average was only 23%. (The only state to be us was Vermont, with just a TAD MORE than us - 28.5% of their residents met the guidelines. Even though this is great news that Montana is near the top of the list, having 20-something percent of your population meeting guidelines doesn't actually seem all that high, does it? Seems like the whole country needs a little outside activity and exercise.

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On the bottom end of the list, it wasn't terribly shocking to find states like Kentucky (#50 at 15.3%), Oklahoma (#49 at 15.6%), and Mississippi (#48 at 15.7%).

SEE THE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY GUIDELINES FOR AMERICANS HERE

Today, about half of all American adults—117 million people—have one or more preventable chronic diseases. Seven of the ten most common chronic diseases are favorably influenced by regular physical activity.

Yet nearly 80 percent of adults are not meeting the key guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activity, while only about half meet the key guidelines for aerobic physical activity.

This lack of physical activity is linked to approximately $117 billion in annual health care costs and about 10 percent of premature mortality.

It’s Really Expensive To Be An Active Outdoor Dude-Man-Bro In Montana