Today’s spin: The U.S. Has improved from third-most to seventh-most in the list of the world’s fattest countries.

The truth: That’s despite getting 12 percent fatter in one year.

GlobalPost released its list of the top 10 fattest countries in the world this week, and the good old U.S. of A. is holding strong at No. 7. Making up the rest of the top 10 is about every South Pacific island nation you can think of.

I was listening to the best podcast on the planet today, and the host pointed out that the typical person living in most of those island nations are just flat-out big. They’re “defensive tackle in the NFL big,” whereas Americans are just plain “fat.”

So if we’re getting fatter as a nation, why the improvement in our ranking on this list?

When looking at last year’s list, it’s one of those good-news-because-we-changed-the-rules situations. In 2009, the U.S. was ranked as third on the GlobalPost list. But that’s because a host of tiny Pacific island nations were left off. They’re on there this year. They probably had a “hey, we’re bigger than those puny Americans” campaign.

So while the U.S. improved from third to seventh on this list in just a single year, the real story is told by the score. In 2009, the U.S. weighed in with a score of 66.7 percent of Americans in the obese category. Compare that to this year’s 79 percent, and going from third to seventh on this list doesn’t sound all that great, does it?

Without further delay, this year’s list:

1 / Nauru: 95%

2 / Micronesia: 92%

3 / The Cook Islands: 92%

4 / Tonga: 92%

5 / Niue: 84%

6 / Samoa: 83%

7 / Palau: 81%

8 / United States: 79%

9 / Kiribati: 77%

10 / Dominica: 76%