Fat Friends Make You Fat 
Corinthian
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New NIH-Supported Study Characterizes Social Networks of Family, Friends Influencing Obesity
For Immediate Release
Wednesday, July 25, 2007Contacts:
Susan Farrer or Linda Joy
301-496-1752
nianews3@mail.nih.govPeople wondering about excessive weight gain might look to their relationships with family and friends for one clue, suggests new research reported July 26, 2007, in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study showed that obesity spreads within social networks and that the closer the social connection--even if people live in different households many miles apart--the greater the influence on developing obesity. The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is the first to provide a detailed picture of the social networks involved in obesity and could prove useful in developing both clinical and public health interventions for obesity.
The analysis was conducted by Nicholas Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Diego, using data from the Framingham Heart Study. The Framingham Heart Study is supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, another NIH component.
"Nearly one in three American adults--66 million men and women--are obese, which puts them at risk for a number of serious health problems, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke. With the sharply rising rates of obesity in this country, we need to learn as much as we can about contributing factors. This study describes social network influences that might be an important part of that equation," says NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D.
A sedentary lifestyle and increased consumption of high-calorie foods are critical factors in the steep rise in the prevalence of obesity, the researchers note. But they suggest that a hierarchy of influence exists among family and friends on developing obesity, in which the attitudes, behaviors, and acceptance of obesity also might play an important role.
To explore whether obesity spreads from person to person within social networks, the research team gleaned weight, height and other data from the records of 5,124 Framingham Heart Study participants at up to seven time points between 1971 and 2003. In addition, they analyzed similar information from the Framingham records of these key participants' parents, spouses, siblings, children and close friends. Together, these individuals formed a large, intertwined social web totaling 12,067 people. The average age of key participants at the inception of the study was 38 years, with a range of 21 to 70 years.
"We were able to reconstruct a large network of individuals who had been repeatedly weighed over time as part of the Framingham Heart Study, and we could see that as one person gained weight, those around him or her gained weight," says Christakis. "We didn't find that people who were overweight simply flocked together. Rather, we found what seemed to be a spread of obesity and that the likelihood of a person becoming obese depended on the nature of the relationship."
"The rising rate of obesity threatens to reverse the decline in disability in the older population, with major implications for the health care system," says Richard Suzman, Ph.D., director of the NIA's Behavioral and Social Research Program. "This seminal study breaks important new ground in showing how social networks may amplify other factors and help account for the dramatic increase in obesity across the population."
Findings include:
- A key participant's chances of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a close friend who became obese.
- In same-sex friendships, a close friend becoming obese increased a key participant's chance of becoming obese by 71 percent. However, no such association was found in opposite-sex friendships.
- The perception of friendship also was an important factor. When two people identified each other as close friends, the key participant's risk of becoming obese increased by 171 percent if his or her friend became obese. In contrast, a key participant was not likely to become obese if someone claimed a close friendship with him or her but the key participant did not report the friendship.
- Among pairs of siblings, one's becoming obese increased the other's chance of becoming obese by 40 percent. This finding was more marked among same-sex siblings than opposite-sex siblings.
- In married couples, one spouse's becoming obese increased the likelihood of the other spouse becoming obese by 37 percent. Husbands and wives appeared to affect each other equally.
- Obesity spread across social ties, despite geographic distance from one person to another. Further, social distance--the degree of social separation between two people in the network--appeared to make more of a difference than geographic distance in the spread of behaviors and norms associated with obesity.
- An immediate neighbor's becoming obese did not affect a person's risk of becoming obese.
- Smoking behavior was not associated with the spread of obesity from person to person.
"We identified distinct clusters of obese people within social networks, and the clusters spread about three people deep," Christakis says. "People who were only one degree removed from each other socially, such as siblings or close friends, influenced one another twice as much as people who were two degrees removed from each other."
NIA leads the federal effort supporting and conducting research on aging and the medical, social and behavioral issues of older people. For information on research and aging, go to www.nia.nih.gov. Publications on research and on a variety of topics of interest on health and aging can be viewed and ordered by visiting the NIA website or can be ordered by calling toll-free 1-800-222-2225.
NIH--the nation's medical research agency--includes 27 institutes and centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, including research and information on reducing obesity, visit www.nih.gov.
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Reference: Christakis, N.A., and Fowler, J.H. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. New England Journal of Medicine (2007), 357(4):370-379.
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- A Dumb Conclusion from a Dumb Study Celcius
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This is a reply to # 926,951A Dumb Conclusion from a Dumb Study
Dale Netherton
Dale Netherton
August 1, 2007
It has now been declared that if your friend(s) are fat you have a greater chance of being fat. What is wrong with this conclusion? First of all, what does friendship have to do with caloric intake, metabolism, personal eating habits and differences in exercise? Certainly friends may share mutual activities; however, there are many people who have skinny or fat friends and who decide for themselves whether they will emulate their friends behavior. This study ignores individual choice and substitutes the nebulous notion that consequences can be passed off to something other than our individual thinking apparatus.
The first question that should be asked is, “ Who is the friend and who is the blind follower that obediently and passively follows the lead of the pig out fanatic? Or is this a matter of synthesis of thought where both come to the same identical spontaneous conclusions about the size of their belt line? If so, what a novel way to use your mind to dissolve the ability of others to use theirs.
Can you imagine the excuses that will arise from this latest “ finding”? “ I can’t help it , I’m fat. All my friends are fat.” or I’ve tried all the diets and exercise but I hang around with people who eat too much and live on the couch and so what’s the use?” Buying into a theory that is derived from looking at data and coming to a conclusion that denies common sense is no way to look after your own welfare.
Suppose you proposed that people get fat because they were the victims of an evil Ronald McDonald who had powers that tempted those with a propensity to fatness to eat the largest burgers and the biggest fries and the richest desserts. Any one who believed such nonsense would negate their ability to think for themselves and promptly use the excuse that the power of the evil Ronald was too much for them to overcome. This new study is based on the same premise.
The irony involved in this is that the people advocating the conclusion of their “findings” would adamantly deny that they came to such a conclusion because of who they hung out with. But if one’s behavior can be dependent on others why are they not included? They did not and will not address this question.
The world is full of people who snatch at every opportunity to match up their inner wishes with something they have heard whether it matches the truth or not. This is a ready market for those who seek either fame or fortune through the gullibility of others. The beauty of the scientists who seek this route is their theories can be analyzed and repudiated. The dogmatists in the religious world allow no such analyses and perpetuate their con game for millennia.
This approach has a name. It is called determinism. Determinism consists of grasping and holding the view that everything is determined and human choice cannot overcome that which is meant to be. “ Meant to be “ by whom or what can never be fully substantiated as has been proven by the history of all who have attempted it. Karl Marx and his dialectical materialism, the prophecies of the mystics, the inevitable growth of government ,all ignore the power of individual choice and what has changed the world. The simple notion that what can one person do about it is a form of determinism that ignores that all innovations have come from the individual mind. The fact that obesity and the lack of obesity can proceed from individual effort based on individual thought evidently is something some individual minds want to undermine. It is a foolish notion and it negates the perpetrator(s). credibility.
You are in charge of the food you put in your mouth and the amount of exercise you choose to indulge in. Your friends can only influence you if you decide with your own mind to emulate their habits. This puts the responsibility directly on you and not your friends. The social dingbats who envision a blob of humanity and downplay the individual are presenting their individual opinion about the diminished role of individual thinking. All it takes to dump such nonsense is to examine it closely with your own ability to think and decide. This applies whether you’re swallowing theoretical nonsense or Boston Creme pie.
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=33826
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This is a reply to # 936,117I myself find the article by Corinthian to be an insult to people who are obese! Many studies show that obese people eat no more then thin people! I cannot reason why a message as biased and unsupportive as this one would receive an R rating in a forum that suppose to support people with a wieght problems!
- Re: A Dumb Conclusion from a Dumb St... Celcius
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