Obesity at a Distance

[bopes]

Here's some (ahem) food for thought:

Obesity Can Spread, Study Says
By GINA KOLATA
Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When one person gained weight, their close friends tended to gain weight, too.

Their 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 three decades. That let them examine what happened over the years as some individuals became obese. Did their friends also become obese? Did family members or neighbors?

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 percent.

There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends.

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 were nearly tripled.

[posypusher]

i have this theory and it goes like this......

weight can never be really "lost"
it can only be transferred to another person(usually a friend)

i think this follows one of the laws of thermodynamics.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Eat more boiled okra and watermelon to lose weight.

[bopes]

Well, I think this story goes to the power of social networks in general.

Take this to the extreme and there's a lot of potential there. America's overweight can now stop feeling sorry for themselves. They have a purpose. Replace the Peace Corps with the Obese Corps. Send our obese out into the hungry world and let them make lots of hungry friends. By association the thin will gain weight and the fat will slim down. Net benefit. For those too obese to travel, hook them up to the internets. Replace the Facebook with Fatbook. It aint proximity, it's friendship. It's got a built in amplification effect, too, through the social network.

I'm being facetious. But it does give one pause for thought. . .

[sidecross]

Is their a connection to 30,000 plus children under the age of 12 who die each day due to starvation and basic hygiene?

Are the 80% of people on the planet that have no access to fresh or clean water in their dwelling share a common under weight problem?

[Rob P]

...

does that mean that obesity spreads
the same way all the little girls want
big sunglasses and slutwear like lindsay and paris....??

in my day, it was called peer pressure....

if you get fat and blame your friends,
i'd say being fat isn't your biggest problem...!!

h.a.n.d.

r o b

...

[craazyman]

another triumph of science