The Great Ganesha

You better watch out. An article in today’s Times talks about a study that showed that obesity is contagious.

Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend 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. [link]

It’s not contagious in the way a cold or a flu is, but it’s more the mind-set that’s contagious.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, says one explanation is that friends affect each others? perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

?You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,? Dr. Christakis said.

Family affects you less than friends. And distance doesn’t seem to matter. That is, even you move far away from an obese friend, there’s a chance that you’ll put on weight. They even give you the odds of gaining weight.

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. [link]

Now, all this talk of obesity has made me hungry. I’m going to find me a fellow overweight buddy so I can eat the burger shown above and blame my belly on him.

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