Utah among healthiest and happiest

Utahns are among the healthiest and happiest Americans, and Morgan County residents, in particular, have reason to celebrate according to results of three national studies released in as many months.

The latest surveys, whose findings were shared Monday and early Wednesday, rate Utahns as having the second-highest well-being in the nation behind residents of Hawaii, and show Morgan County as the healthiest region within the Beehive State.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index 2009 provides state-level data following more than 350,000 interviews conducted among adults age 18 or older across all 50 states. Gallup and Healthways started tracking state-level well-being in 2008. It combines an average of six sub-indexes, which individually examine life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities.

Morgan County was ranked the healthiest in Utah as part of the County Health Rankings report, authored by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That survey looked at five factors among residents in more than 3,000 counties nationwide to come up with its rankings, which place Carbon County residents at the bottom of Utah's "healthy" list.

It surveyed wealth, access to primary medical care, healthy foods, diabetic screening, binge drinking, tobacco use, obesity rates, and high school graduation rates and tried to link how those factors are linked to health. With that data, it applied five measures of overall health:

the rate of people dying before age 75.

the percent of people who report being in fair or poor health.

the numbers of days people report being in poor physical and poor mental health.

the rate of low birth-weight infants.

The new findings come just three months after a similar report dubbed America's Health Rankings, by the United Health Foundation. In that survey, Utah came in second only to Vermont in a broad measure of health and overall physical well-being.

It said Utah has the lowest rates in the nation for smoking, cancer deaths, infant mortality and binge drinking, but found the availability of primary care physicians here limited compared with other areas.