You Are What You Eat - And Who You Know

See below about an interesting article about how your weight is related to the weight of the people you hang out with on a regular basis...yikes!

WSJ.com

You Are What You Eat–And Who You Know
Posted by Jacob Goldstein

Detail from a diagram of the relationships in the study It may be time to start thinking of obesity as an infectious disease.
Among more than 12,000 people in a decades-long study of heart disease, a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who also became obese, and by 37% if a spouse became obese. In a twist reminiscent of the pop-culture game six degrees of Kevin Bacon, researchers found that if your friend’s friend became obese, it increased your chances of becoming obese by 45%. If your friend’s friend’s friend became obese, it increased your chances by 20%.

Nearly as striking as the findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was the method: social network analysis. The technique looks for patterns in human relationships and has become popular in the social sciences. But the approach isn’t used widely by health researchers.

The statistics were adjusted every which way to account for age, sex and education, and the results suggest that who your friends are is a more important factor in weight gain than your genes.

“These results are going to shift the way we think about some of these supposedly non-communicable diseases — we’ll start thinking about network dynamics,” said Richard Suzman, a researcher at the National Institute on Aging, which funded the study. “There are going to be studies of how patients interact in networks, how physicians interact in networks. Perhaps that will give some understanding of the geographic variability that we see in many diseases.”

The authors, Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego, mined data from the Framingham Heart Study. That study has tracked the health of thousands of people in Framingham, Massachusetts over the course of many decades, collecting a dizzying array of information — including a list of friends of each participant, as well as family relationships.

When a friend or spouse on a participant’s list was also a participant in the study (which happened often, because so many Framinghamians have been enrolled in the study) Christakis and Fowler were able to track the weight of both friends (or both spouses) over time. One limitation: Framingham is a mostly white, mostly middle class town, so it’s unclear how the results would generalize to more diverse populations.