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Friends Can Make You Fat

Friends Can Make You Fat!  Is Obesity Contagious?       Next Article >>

An interesting twist regarding the "obesity epidemic"...obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers just recently reported. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight as well.

A study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003. The investigators knew who was friends with whom, as well as who was a spouse or sibling or neighbor, and they knew how much each person weighed at various times over 30 years. That let them examine what happened over the years as some people became obese. Did family members or neighbors grow fatter also? The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. that increased a person's chances of becoming obese by 57%.

The influence of the friend remained even if the friend was hundreds of miles away. The greatest influence of all was between mutual close friends. The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, the investigators say. But since most people were gaining, not losing, over the 32 years of the study, the result was an obesity epidemic.

According to Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a doctor and professor at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, one explanation is that friends affect each others' perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

These findings, according to the researchers, can help explain why Americans have become fatter in recent years. In effect, each person who becomes obese was likely to drag some friends with them. Their analysis was unique because it moved beyond a simple analysis of one person and his/her social contacts, and  instead examined an entire social network at once, looking at how a person's friend's friend's friend's, or spouse's sibling's friends, could have an influence on a person's weight.

This may mean that something in the environment seeded what many call an "obesity epidemic", leading a few people to gain weight. Then social networks let the obesity spread rapidly. It also may mean that the way to avoid becoming obese is to avoid having fat friends.

The calculations show that, on average, a person who became obese gained 17 pounds, and the newly obese person's friend gained 5 lbs.. But some gained less or did not gain at all, while others gained much more.

The data Dr. Christakis needed was contained in a large federal study of heart disease, the Framingham Heart Study, which followed the population of Framingham, Massachusetts. The study's records included each participant's address and the names of family members. In order for the researchers to be sure they did not lose track of their subjects, each was asked to name a close friends who would know where they were at the time of their next exam, in roughly 4 years. Since much of the town and most of the subjects' relatives were participating, the data contained all that Dr. Christakis and his colleagues needed to reconstruct the social network and follow it for 32 years.

Many say the findings is are groundbreaking, and can shed new light on how and why people have gotten so fat so fast. However, Dr. Stephen O'Rahilly, an obesity researcher at the University of Cambridge, said the uniqueness of the Framingham data will make it hard to replicate new findings. No other study that he knows of includes the same kinds of long-term and detailed data on social interactions.