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BRUCE ASATO / BASATO@STARADVERTISER.COM WAIKIKI FITNESS PLAN: Bar dips are part of Rick Wagner’s exercise regimen, which includes swimming and pull-ups in the Sans Souci Beach area near the Waikiki Natatorium. The bar dips work his triceps, and the pull-ups work his biceps, Wagner says.
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People in Hawaii are the happiest and healthiest in the nation, according to an annual national survey released Wednesday.
We even like work.
The 2012 Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index ranked Hawaii as the top state in the nation for the fourth year in a row.
Among metropolitan areas, Honolulu metro area, from about Aiea to Hawaii Kai, ranked seventh in the well-being index among urban communities.
Hawaii residents reported the best sense of satisfaction with life, emotional health, and work environment. We ranked second in healthy behavior and physical health. We ranked 14th, still in the top half of the nation, in basic access to food, shelter, health care and a safe and satisfying place to live.
The ranking is based on daily surveys conducted over the course of a year with more than 353,000 respondents. A little less than a thousand people were surveyed in Hawaii.
Generally, states that rank high in the survey rate their lives better today and in the future; have better emotional health, including much lower clinically diagnosed depression and daily sadness; are in better health with lower obesity, blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol; enjoy their jobs more; smoke less and exercise more, according to Gallup and Healthways, a well-being improvement company that works on reducing health care costs and productivity.
Besides Hawaii, the top states in 2012 were Colorado, Minnesota, Utah and Vermont. The bottom states were West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas.
Hawaii’s overall score in the index was 71.1 out of a possible 100, up from 70.2 in 2011.
Hawaii also did well in a happiness survey released last week by researchers at the University of Vermont.
They studied more than 10 million geotagged tweets, and if Twitter is an indication of happiness, lucky you live Hawaii.
The researchers assigned happiness values to words in tweets from Hawaii.
The result: Hawaii has the happiest tweets, followed by Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont. On the opposite end of the social media happiness scale, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia are the saddest states.
The study notes that Hawaii has a slight advantage over other states because the abbreviation for Hawaii is ‘HI," which has a high happiness word value. There are also more beach- and food-related words in Hawaii tweets, which are also happier tweets.
But the researchers note, "The rich variety of happy words occurring in Hawaii paints a convincing picture of it as a happy state regardless of this small bias."
Researchers noted that Louisiana, which also has a high tourist population and lots of tweets about food, was the saddest state, mainly because of the abundance of profanity in the tweets, an indication of sadness.
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BRUCE ASATO / BASATO@STARADVERTISER.COM