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TweetFat people are so silly and pathetic... watching them fill themselves with garbage makes me feel sorry for their body's... they won't pour water in their car's gas tanks but they will readily destroy their body.
Did you see the new fat-by-association research? Don't let them lure you into their world!Wipe the drip of saliva and move on...
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.
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years
Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., and James H. Fowler, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
Background The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30 years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.
Methods We evaluated a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. The body-mass index was available for all subjects. We used longitudinal statistical models to examine whether weight gain in one person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbors.
Results Discernible clusters of obese persons (body-mass index [the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters], ≥30) were present in the network at all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123) if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account for the spread of obesity in the network.
Conclusions Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. These findings have implications for clinical and public health interventions.
ARTICLE
Originally Posted by daved150
