WINDBER, Pa. – When Ray Crawford walks down the hallway of his school, the beefy, 240-pound sophomore says he doesn’t stand out much. Many of his classmates are heavy, too.

“We go to the Eat ‘n Park to meet and chill, maybe don’t eat the right things,” he said, referring to a regional chain restaurant famous for its smiley-faced cookies. “There’s not much else to do.”

Here in his small hometown in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania and in other rural communities like it, many health officials say the tide of obesity is rising faster than anywhere else.

And new research appears to back them up, dispelling a long-held belief that in farm communities and other rural towns, heavy chores, wide expanses of land and fresh air make leaner, stronger bodies.

“Whatever the situation was, rural areas are leading the way now …they’re ahead of the curve,” said Michael Meit, director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Rural Health Practice. “Something’s happened.”

The Center for Rural Pennsylvania released a study recently that used state health figures to compare the body-mass index of seventh-graders in urban and rural communities – more than 25,000 students in all.

About 16% of urban students qualified as obese, according to the study, which is in line with national average for children ages 6-19. In rural school districts, however, 20% of students were considered obese.

More alarmingly, researchers found that during the years of the survey, between 1999 and 2001, the number of obese students in rural school districts rose about 5%, more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts.

The same trends are being reported from New Mexico to Michigan to West Virginia. In Michigan, children in rural areas were 3% to 9% more likely to be obese, researchers found. In rural North Carolina children had a 50% greater chance of being obese.

Mostly rural states have done studies that don’t distinguish between urban and rural children, but they have found the incidence of childhood obesity to be far greater than the national average.

More than a quarter of all fifth graders in West Virginia are obese, where two-thirds of the population is rural. One in four public school children in Arkansas are obese. “It is accelerating,” said Dr. Darrell Ellsworth, director of cardiovascular disease research at the Windber Research Institute.

Researchers are not ready to point a finger at any one culprit for rural obesity, but they have some theories. For one thing, with fewer family farms and more mechanization, children are not burning many calories, but they’re still eating high-calorie meals.