A reporter from the conservative British tabloid the Daily Mail recently descended on Little Rock, painting the town as a grotesque place where residents gobble 7,000-calorie burgers on our lunch breaks and ride around on mobility scooters as our parks and gyms sit empty. The writer was here to explore America’s fattest city, a dubious honorific Little Rock earned earlier this year after bumping McAllen, Texas, out of the top spot.
If this unflattering portrayal feels a bit skewed, you’re onto something. Our parks and gyms aren’t empty, and more to the point: Honolulu — the country’s trimmest town according to WalletHub, the financial services platform that issues the rankings — has an almost identical percentage of overweight adults (32%) as Little Rock (33%). And a closer look at the data reveals we’re actually 19th in adult obesity, which seems to indicate that we’re miles away from the fattest city. The website looks at multiple lifestyle and health factors to come up with its rankings, as it turns out.
But the bigger problem — pun intended — with the Daily Mail story and WalletHub’s analysis is the emphasis on obesity as a stand-alone issue and a personal failure. The reporter pegged expanding waistlines to Little Rockers’ love of Chick-fil-A and cheeseburgers the size of our heads. The writer couldn’t fathom why no one was in our many beautiful parks on a 90-degree weekday. WalletHub, meanwhile, blames cities like Little Rock for “tipping the scale in favor of poor health” across the United States.
These portrayals miss that obesity is symptomatic of larger problems. Yes, Little Rockers love their rich food, preferably dipped in ranch, but that’s not the only reason or even the main reason we’re struggling to stay healthy, experts say.
Who are you calling fat?
First, a reality check: Americans everywhere are battling obesity. And conversations about the condition too often tip into fat-shaming, instead of taking seriously the chronic health problems like heart disease, diabetes and even early death rates that are sometimes tied to a higher body mass index (which itself is a debated metric when assessing health).
What pushed Little Rock to the top of WalletHub’s fattest city ranking is our relatively higher rates of obese adults and, perhaps more alarmingly, overweight and obese kids and teens. About 37% of adults in Little Rock are obese, compared with one-fourth of the population in Honolulu. Twenty-three percent of our kids, aged 10 to 17, are obese, and an additional 18% are overweight, compared with 17% and 13%, respectively, in Honolulu.
Why are kids gaining weight? According to data compiled by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, a nonpartisan policy center, childhood obesity skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the rate of BMI increase among children and adolescents doubled. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, extra screen time, more stress, less physical activity and less access to nutritious food are thought to have caused kids to put on the pounds.
Inflation is another likely culprit, said Stephanie Walker Hynes, the director of child nutrition for the Little Rock School District. She’s personally seen an uptick in obesity within the city’s school system, she said. “Everything costs more, and people are having to make terrible decisions. They’re making survival decisions,” she said. As the price of food continues to rise, families are eating cheaper, less healthy options.
Walker Hynes added that in her line of work, hunger is a more urgent issue than obesity. “We have seen obesity, but I think mostly what we see is hungry children,” she said. Over 75% of Little Rock public school children qualify for reduced or free lunches.
One of the ways the school district is helping kids eat healthier is by expanding access to public school meals, which are far more nutritious than the way most of us eat. “School meals have more fruits and vegetables, whole grains, calorie limits, sodium limits, sugar limits, limits on unhealthy fat,” Walker Hynes said.
Recent Arkansas laws have expanded access to free school meals, with Act 656, which passed in 2023, providing free meals to any kid who meets income eligibility requirements and Act 123, which was enacted in 2025, dropping charges for school breakfasts. Arkansas has also opted into a federally funded school food assistance program.
These changes have been enormously helpful, Walker Hynes said. “Kids are eating school meals regardless of their income or ability to pay or status,” she said. “Not only that, they’re being satisfied.” The school district prides itself on its menu, which taps into food trends like teriyaki chicken and Wing Wednesdays that have been a big hit with students.
Miles to the nearest Kroger
The notion that overweight people simply can’t stop eating is a gross stereotype. Some overweight kids are, in fact, food-insecure, and some oscillate between going hungry and eating cheap, processed food. Walker Hynes said that some children in the public school system lack access to refrigeration and basic kitchen gadgets like a can opener that might help them prepare healthier meals from scratch at home, for example.
Another factor that contributes to poor health, including obesity, is limited access to healthcare. According to the Commonwealth Fund 2025 Scorecard on State Health System Performance, Arkansas ranks near or at the bottom in preventive health care screenings for both children and adults and has a high percentage of uninsured and underinsured people. Many people are swimming in high out-of-pocket costs relative to income, which means they’re not getting regular input from doctors on how to manage high blood pressure and cholesterol or tweak their diets.
It’s also much too hard to find healthy food in Little Rock. Yes, Arkansans — like most Americans — may spend too much time in fast-food drive-thrus. But many areas of the city are veritable food deserts that lack grocery stores. WalletHub metrics put the city at 11th for limited access to healthy food, meaning we’re near the bottom of the cities evaluated for convenient access to more nutritious options. Instead, Little Rock has a higher concentration of so-called “food swamps,” areas where convenience stores and fast food are all that’s on offer.
“Most of the neighborhoods where our children come from have fast food convenience gas stations as a primary example where they shop, or they’re shopping from Dollar General,” said Kathy Webb, city director and co-chair of the 2022 Arkansas Governor’s Food Desert Working Group. These stores, while convenient, sell mostly junk food.
What’s more, Little Rock is relatively spread out and poor compared to other cities of our size, which can make it difficult for grocers to stay in business, according to a 2022 report by the Food Desert Working Group. The report found that the number of grocery stores in Arkansas is on the decline, making access to fresh, nutritious food that much more difficult. Webb added that grocery stores have struggled in recent years in part because Arkansas decided to end COVID-19-related emergency allotments of SNAP benefits in 2023.
That’s where mobile markets come in. In March, the city of Little Rock, in conjunction with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University District Development Corporation, launched a mobile market — a 44-foot trailer carrying fruits and vegetables and other grocery staples that parks in areas with limited access to supermarkets. “The purpose of the mobile market is to take affordable, healthy food to folks in areas of the city where there is no grocery store,” Webb explained.
The Daily Mail also seized on another contradiction: Little Rock has extraordinary access to parks and green spaces, so why are we gaining weight? It’s not, as the writer suggested, because we don’t use our parks (we do); it’s just that Little Rock is struggling, like a lot of cities, to reimagine its built environment to make it more walkable and bikeable so residents have ways to be more active in their everyday lives. Little Rock has a walkability score of 48 out of 100, according to WalkScore, meaning the city is largely car-dependent.
But that’s starting to change, at least in some neighborhoods like SoMA and Pettaway, with bigger changes on the horizon envisioned under the Downtown Little Rock Master Plan. James Walden, urban planning leader at Garver and a staff planning consultant for the Arkansas Municipal League, said that an increase in development in older neighborhoods, the walkability of Pettaway Square and efforts to close the loop on the River Trail are evidence that the city is motivated to get people moving. “There’s a lot to be positive about in that direction,” he said.
Little Rock loves decadent food. Our obsession with all things fried and fattening might be a bit shocking to outsiders, but the way we eat isn’t unique to Arkansas. The Daily Mail came to Little Rock wanting to photograph people waddling to cars, and it found what it was looking for. That’s an easier story to tell than what’s really going on around here, which is a city struggling with poverty, uneven healthcare and neighborhoods built around cars instead of people — and all the good things people are doing to turn things around.
Dining and Cooking