While there is much attention on the epidemic of obesity in the US, new research on the mechanism by which this occurs is just starting to come out. New research by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler at the Harvard Medical School and UCSD published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that social networks in the Framingham Heart Study transmit the risk of obesity. In an extensive dataset of social networks formed by thousands of residents of Framingham over several decades, the authors found that people gain weight when their friends gain weight, and that this relationship also works in the opposite direction: those with friends who lost weight lost weight themselves. See The New York Times article that discusses the research and some of the controversies that it causes in how we think about obesity and its social implications.
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