Veterans of the Humboldt County General Plan Wars will remember the great hue and cry of indignation that arose when, a few years ago, it was suggested that compact, infill-style development equates to healthier and skinnier children. 

WHAT? countered the Humboldt Coalition for Property Rights and other groups and persons opposed to the Plan A — that is, the concentration of new development around existing city centers. Why, there is no healthier lifestyle than the backwoods lifestyle! They kids out in them hills are forever picking fruit, chopping wood, battling bears, scaling Everests, etc.

Well, now, if you take a look at a new report published by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, you might have to concede that the HumCPRsters have a point. The report is called “A Patchwork of Progress: Changes in Overweight and Obesity Among California 5th, 7th and 9th Graders, 2005–2010,” and it contains a curious county-by-county breakdown of childhood obesity across the state.

Which are the skinniest counties? Almost exclusively, they are the mountainous rural ones: Lassen, Mariposa, Placer, Plumas, Nevada, Tuolumne and Trinity all have childhood obesity rates under 30 percent. (Marin County sneaks in there too.) Case closed, eh?

Maybe and maybe not. After all, Plan A supporters weren’t so much making the case for rural fatitude as they were for suburban blimpiness. Take a look at the, uh, largest counties in the state; they’re dominated by the exurbian hellscapes of places like Colusa, Madera, Fresno, Imperial, Merced and Yuba counties.

Humboldt County and the North Coast generally are pretty damned chunky and getting chunkier. The childhood obesity rate here is bucking state trends by rising: Up to 40 percent and change in 2010. Del Norte is a particular disappointment to its parents, blowing up to a whopping 45 percent over the last five years. Yesterday the Del Norte Triplicate ran a somewhat shell-shocked story on its county’s standings. (If you can call it that — maybe “sittings” is closer to the mark.)