Nevada County is still one of the healthiest counties in California. We rank 14th among the state’s 58 counties. But that’s unchanged from a year ago, and the county’s Public Health Director, Jill Blake, says there’s always room for improvement, with stagnant numbers in many individual categories…

The annual report, from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, shows that only 12-percent of residents in the county are in poor or fair health. The category with the most notable improvement was physical environment. But Blake says even minor drops in other counties can spike those numbers for them. She says the low air pollution in the report focuses only on particulate matter…

The report also shows little or no change in health behaviors, with 12-percent of adults smoking and 20-percent obese. But access to exercise opportunities improved from 62 to 79-percent of the population. Placer County was the fourth-healthiest county, with Lake County the least-healthy and Marin county the healthiest. The report also shows that in many cases counties that did the best had the highest median incomes.