Georgia's Least Drinking County

As my ones of regular readers know, I've been fiddling with health data of all counties in the U.S. One of the more interesting measures in the data is a favorite topic of mine -- drinking. In the whole country, the teetotaler winner is Plute County, Utah, coming in at #3,140 when it comes to excessive drinking.

But don't give up, Georgia fans.

Turns out Taliaferro County, Georgia, does pretty well with a tie at #3,120 (Quitman County, Georgia, is tied at #3,116).

So why Taliaferro? It's in the map, the red blip, and is the least populous county in Georgia and, according to the magic of Wikipedia, the second least populated county east of the Mississippi River. The 2010 Census had all of 759 households. Hell, there are neighborhoods with more homes.

What else stands out about this county that might explain this lack of adult beverage consumption? Oddly it scores high in number of mentally unhealthy days, with a rank of #84 about of over 3K counties in the U.S. But, it has a lot of poverty (49 percent of kids in poverty) and 43 percent of the households are single-parent. You might think those are good arguments for drinking to excess, but apparently not. It also ranks fairly high on obesity (#679 nationally, with over a third obese.

All in all, no easy answers to explain why.