Today
Do Your Friends Make You Fat?
by Jed Diamond
Posted July 29, 2007 5:20 PM
Posted July 29, 2007 5:20 PM
Posted in
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The latest estimates are that unless we make significant changes in how we eat, 70% of women and 90% of men will become overweight during our life-times. Though there are a lot of reasons we gain weight including genetics, stress, lack of exercise, readily available high-fat foods, corporate greed, etc., a new study suggests that weight gain my be contagious.
We may be picking up those extra pounds as a result of our social interactions with friends and family. And this is no "pop" psych study. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it 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. Here’s what they found.
According to the studies lead researcher, Dr. Nicholas Christakis from Harvard, "If your close friend becomes obese, you are then almost 60 percent more likely to become obese, too." When I first heard these statistics, I couldn’t believe it. In my mind when I’m around friends who are putting on weight, I think to myself, "I don’t want to look like that. I have to try harder to keep my weight under control." However, I suspect the influence friends have on each other may be more subtle. Weight-loss is difficult. I know when I look around at my friends, it’s easy to justify my own weight gain. "Hey, we’re all putting on a few pounds. We’re not really overweight." This conclusion is validated by the Harvard study. "When people around you gain weight," says Dr. Christakis, "your attitudes about what constitutes an acceptable body size changes, and you might then follow suit and emulate that body size." Family members influence our weight-gain as well. "Obesity spreads through friends and through spouses and through siblings," says Dr. James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, another one of the study’s authors. Among married couples, when one spouse becomes obese, the risk to the other increases by 37 percent. For siblings, the risk rises 40 percent.
Interestingly there was no effect if a neighbor gained or lost weight. It seems we are influenced by those we are closest with—friends and family. Proximity did not seem to matter: The influence of the friend remained, even if the friend was hundreds of miles away. And the greatest influence of all was between mutual close friends. There, if one became obese, the odds of the other becoming obese nearly tripled.
If our close social networks can help make us fat, can they also help us lose weight?
What’s your experience? Have you noticed that you are more accepting of weight-gain when a close friend or family member gains weight? Have you found that losing weight together can give you the social support you need to stay on your program?
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