Weight Management for Your Life: Ten Steps to Prepare You for Adopting a Healthy Lifestyle by Goldman Charles

Author:Goldman, Charles [Goldman, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2014-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Social networks and being overweight

In 2007, an article appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) with the title "The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years."1 The same day the article was published it made front page news. No previous research had focused so intensively on "the obesity epidemic" as a social network phenomenon. The main finding of this elaborate study was that friends have a highly significant influence on our weight, specifically whether we become obese. The effect of friendship was surprisingly large and exceeded the influence of siblings and spouse (whose influence was also significant).

The effect on weight of a friend becoming obese was measured over time and distance, and it was evident that it was the nature of the friendship (mutual and same gender) that exerted the influence, not proximity or mere acquaintanceship. Neighbors who were not friends, and people who were not held in esteem by the research subject, had no impact. The cause of the influence, which works for weight loss as well as weight gain, was thought to be a sharing of ideas -- about what is a desirable weight, about food, about health-related choices. The authors concluded that "the psychosocial mechanisms of the spread of obesity may rely less on behavioral imitation than on a change in [a person's] general perception of the social norms regarding the acceptability of obesity."

The study, federally funded and carried out by researchers from Harvard and University of California, has opened up the possibility that weight is at least as much a function of psychosocial factors as it is biological factors. The editorial in the NEJM accompanying the article put it this way:

"As the article by Christakis and Fowler [the researchers] shows, ... networks, in this case those that pertain to social influence, may have just as strong an impact on the development of obesity as the otherwise strong genetic effects. The role of links and connections does not stop here. In the past few years, we learned that network effects increasingly affect all aspects of biologic and medical research, from disease mechanisms to drug discovery. It is only a matter of time until these advances will start to affect medical practice as well, marking the emergence of a new field that may be aptly called network medicine."2

A Time magazine article about the research concluded:

"Fowler and Christakis say that the contagion-effect should hold just as much for weight loss as it does for weight gain. 'I would hope this influences individuals to get friends and families involved in decisions about health,' Fowler says. After all, he says, a weight-loss plan may be more effective if the people closest to you are on board. And, if you're successful, your good health will help others achieve a healthy weight too. The impact extends not just to your friends, it turns out -- but also to your friends' friends, and even to their friends. ... Helping one person lose weight can have a snowball effect through an entire social network.

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