Zeiza

Researchers at Harvard University have recently published a study which suggests that having overweight friends might make you fat yourself.

In fact, the study found that having four obese friends makes a person twice as likely to become obese.

The researchers have not looked into the cause and effect relationship that might be at work here, but they suggest that spending time around people with unhealthy eating habits promotes further unhealthy eating.

Currently, a little more than one third of American adults are obese, a proportion which has not changed much in the past ten years–although reports, also from Harvard University, suggest that the figure could hit 42 percent some time around 2050.

This idea of obesity being ‘contagious’ has been explored before. In 2007, Dr. Nicholas Christakis co-authored a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medecine which suggested that obesity could spread through social networks. They found that obesity rates tend to increase exponentially, because the likelihood of one person being obese increases with every additional obese acquaintance.

The study found that the effect does not work in reverse–in other words, weight gain is contagious, but weight loss is not.

Dr. Scott Kahan, co-director of the George Washington University Weight Management Center, suggests that the findings of this study could be misleading because recent efforts aimed at educating the public about the dangers of obesity, and the best ways to avoid it, have changed people’s habits.

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