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You are What Your Friends and Family Eat

If you've noticed you're having trouble fitting into your jeans lately, look to your friends and family--odds they've been packing on the pounds too. According to a study released in the July 26 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine, your chances of becoming obese increase drastically as the waistlines of those you care for expand.

If your spouse becomes obese, your odds of following suit increase by 37 percent. The statistics are even higher if the weight-gainer is a sibling (40 percent increase) or a close friend of the same gender (71 percent).

Using data garnered from the Framingham Heart Study Nicholas Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Diego, studied the relationship status and weight gain issues of 12,067 people. The group of people included 5,124 key participants, along with their immediate family and close friends. The average age of key participants at the start of the study was 38 years, with a range of 21 to 70 years.

While diet and exercise directly factor into weight gain, researchers say "a hierarchy of influence" may transmit habits and attitudes about obesity through social networks.

"We were able to reconstruct a large network of individuals who had been repeatedly weighed over time as part of the Framingham Heart Study, and we could see that as one person gained weight, those around him or her gained weight," Christakis says. "We didn't find that people who were overweight simply flocked together. Rather, we found what seemed to be a spread of obesity and that the likelihood of a person becoming obese depended on the nature of the relationship."

The research reveals that it is the closeness of the social relationships themselves that matter, not physical proximity--increased chances of becoming obese were a factor even when the two subjects lived hundreds of miles apart, while an immediate neighbor's weight gain proved to be irrelevant.

The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is the first to provide a detailed picture of the social networks involved in weight gain and could prove useful in developing both clinical and public health interventions for obesity.

FULL TEXT: The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years