Overweight friends will lard it over you, study finds

BY JORDAN LITE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, July 26th 2007, 4:00 AM

Is gaining weight contagious?

Yes, according to a surprising new study that says keeping company with the obese can make you fat, too.

A person's likelihood of getting pudgy rises by 57% if he or she has a friend who's overweight. That risk triples among close friends, according to the findings reported in today's New England Journal of Medicine.

The phenomenon can be seen even in people who are three degrees removed from each other, such as friends of friends of friends. And geographic distance doesn't diminish the risk.

"The actions of people who are quite distant from you in a social network cascade and still affect you. It's a social contagion," said study author Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University.

The risk of gaining weight rises by 40% if a sibling gets heavy and by 37% if a spouse becomes obese. The effect is stronger when friends and family are the same gender as you are, according to the study of 12,067 people over 32 years.

While it could be that friends copy each other's behavior, it's more likely that being exposed to overweight people creates a new standard of acceptable body size, Christakis said.

"This is an amazing finding," said Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the comprehensive weight control program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell.

But he immediately saw cause for concern.

"There's a danger that people will be biased against the overweight even more than in the past," Aronne said. "Is a mother going to say, 'I'm not going to let my kid play with an overweight kid because it's going to make my kid overweight'?"

On the plus side, the person-to-person effect holds for fitness, too, Christakis found.

"If your close friend loses weight, it has an effect on you," he said.

http://www.nydailynews.co...r_you.html

these studies crack me up-as somebody who has participated in scientific studies they are just a way to sit on your arse-imagine"we want you to do a study on fat ass people and see if there mates get fat....."

you get paid your hourly rate and stretch out your"qualaitive/quantitive data"for a year.....

and at the end of the day you hand ina 50000 word thesis which could be summed in one sentance-yes fat people attract other fatties

the world ignores it and you go back to work with research on your cv

Obesity is contagious: you can easily catch it from doughnuts and burgers.

You can easily catch it around 2am in any bar.

Perhaps they should round up all us fat people and quarantine us on an island somewhere. You know, if they give us ice cream and chocolates, I'm totally in.

I thought this was a no-brainer anyway. If you're hanging out w/ people that go out to eat all the time, or what you do with them socially centers around food a lot, it's logical that you're all going to put on weight together.

minneapolisgenius said:

Yup. but they had to come up with a study, and spend lots of money that could've gone to less important things, like finding cures and such

Perhaps they should round up all us fat people and quarantine us on an island somewhere. You know, if they give us ice cream and chocolates, I'm totally in.

CarrieMpls said:

But no cigarettes, 'cos that will keep you thin and then you'll get kicked off the island.

sextonseven said:

You just ruined a good fantasy I had going there.

CarrieMpls said:

Sorry, you can't be a svelte smoker and live on fat island. You must choose one or the other.