the-diet-plan.com

Obesity is “socially contagious” and so is thinness. A new article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine with lead authors from Harvard Medical School and the University of California at San Diego says so. They studied data from over 12,000 adults covering a period of 32 years. Seems like a pretty good sample size to me.

They found that if a person becomes obese, their friends and family, especially those of the same sex, have a greater chance of becoming obese themselves.

If your friend puts on the pounds, your own chances of doing the same go up 57%. If two or more of your mutual friends are large, your chances go up 117%! If your brother or sister or spouse is obese (a score of 30 or more on the Body Mass Index scale), your likelihood increases around 40%.

It wasn’t that the obese or non obese people were just finding similar types to hang out with. Nope, there was a causal relationship. This was also not just due to similarities in lifestyle or environment, like eating the same things or exercising (or not) together. People, especially friends, who lived a long way away from each other were just as likely to share being obese or non-obese. The researchers wrote that the effect might be from how we establish/confirm our idea of what is “OK and “normal” with respect to body size.

“What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most
likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate
body size. People come to think that it is okay to be bigger since
those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads,” said
Nicholas Christakis of HMS.

“This is about people’s ideas about their
bodies and their health,” James Fowler, of UCSD, said. “Consciously or unconsciously,
people look to others when they are deciding how much to eat, how much
to exercise and how much weight is too much.”

A lot of what we have been reading about in the past has dealt with looking at the physical processes involved in becoming obese or thin and looking for genes that might have some effect. Now we know we also have to look at a person’s social networks - their friends, their friends’ friends, and their immediate family. (Didn’t see anything in this article about parents. Wonder what effect their weight state might have.)

The good thing is, that when one person moves out of obesity, they also help a lot of others do the same thing. So now we owe it to our friends and family to become the healthy, active, slim person we all are, deep down inside.  –Di

To read more about this: Obesity Is ‘Socially Contagious,’ Study Finds

technorati tags:obesity, weight, loss, social, networks, obese, friends

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.