Step aside men of Motown, Sin City and the Big Apple. Nashville now ranks as the manliest city in America. Mars Snackfood US announced today the release of "America's Manliest Cities" - a study commissioned by COMBOS® Brand in partnership with Bert Sperling, the research expert behind the popular "Best Places to Live" studies.

Via the "America's Manliest Cities" study, COMBOS® - the hearty, pretzel and cracker snack made with real cheese - examines what makes a city manly and then ranks 50 major metropolitan areas using criteria such as number of professional major league sports teams, popularity of tools and hardware and frequency of monster truck rallies. Cities also lose ranking points for emasculating characteristics like the abundance of home furnishing stores, high minivan sales and subscription rates to beauty magazines.

The manliest ranking comes as COMBOS® launches its Ultimate Man Zone Sweepstakes, an opportunity for guys to improve their favorite hangouts and win prize packages to upgrade their tailgating, grilling, home theater or gaming "zones." And also thanks to COMBOS®women now know where to find the manliest men around.

"As the ultimate hearty snack, COMBOS® created the Ultimate Man Zone Sweepstakes to give guys the opportunities to improve their favorite hangouts," said Craig Hall, general manager, Mars Snackfood US. "Through our COMBOS® 'America's Manliest Cities' study, we want to let guys know where their hometowns stack up against their brethren coast-to-coast when it comes to manliest."

Manly Study Highlights:
Nashville is the Mecca of manliness. With its high number of NASCAR enthusiasts, popularity of hunting and fishing and concentration of BBQ restaurants, the Music City stands alone atop the mountain of manliness.

Despite high ratings in the "bowling" category, New York City ranks 50th out of 50 in the study due to low scores in manly indicators such as "fishing," "home improvement" and "drag racing."

If you're in the Midwest and looking to enjoy a game with a cold beverage, look no farther than St. Louis, which has the highest concentration of sports bars in the country.

Grand Rapids, Mich. has more monster truck rallies, per capita, than any other U.S. city.

Got chainsaws? What about hammers and power drills? The men of New Orleans do. The "Big Easy" boasts more hardware stores per capita than any other U.S. city.

The Manly Methodology
The rankings were determined using 50 of the largest metropolitan areas as defined by the United States Census Bureau, which includes a central city and the surrounding county (or counties). Each metro area received a manliness rating between 0 and 100 based on how well it performed in each of the study's manly categories. Factors used to determine the manliest city rankings included the number of U.S.-made cars driven in the city, number of sports bars and BBQ restaurants, number of home improvement and hardware stores as well as manly salty snacks consumption. All data was adjusted by the current population of the cities to arrive at "per capita" figures, providing an accurate comparison between cities of varying sizes.

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