DO FRIENDS INFLUENCE OUR WEIGHT?

Well coming across this article what do you think? Having a great cross section of friends I cant say this has effected me in any way. Is it because if you socalise with heavier people who tend to eat more you tend to copy them. Research in the past has shown that children inherit their parent's eating patterns, just because the parents are obese it doesn't follow genetically that the children will be. If the parents nibble constantly it generally follows the children will copy. So could this possibly be the reason, we copy and mirror those around us. It also says here that this works in reverse. So should those who are overweight socialise with thin people. For myself I have always been an independent thinker, who is not easily influenced, so this wont make any difference to me. Readers can come to your own opinion

Do our friends make us fatter? Thin people who socialise with the obese 'will get heavier'

It may seem like bad news for the thin among us, but socialising with people heavier than yourself could make you put on weight.
However, it could be good news for the larger among us, because the process can theoretically work in reverse too, according to research in the U.S.
Scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler examined 32 years of data collected during a study of people's hearts in the town of Framingham in Massachusetts.

See the video below...

Fat friends: Socialising with people larger than yourself could you you gain up to 57 per cent more eight over time

The pair discovered that where two people who are friends for a long time, and where one is heavier than the other, the thinner friend tended to increase in weight by up to 57 per cent over time.
The figure was made more even more stark when compared to the likelihood of the same happening between genetic relations - 40 per cent - and spouses, where the weight increase is an average of 37 per cent.
As an example of how it affects people who aren't friends, the pair studied the weights of neighbours and found no link in weight increase.

 

'I think our findings reinforced the idea that because people are interconnected, their health is interconnected,' said Dr.Christakis on NPR.com.
But here is the good news. The process could be reversible too, helping  obese people to lose weight.
Dr.Christakis said: 'The same kind of phenomenon that contributes to an obesity epidemic could potentially — potentially — be harnessed to contribute to a reversal of the epidemic, because it's equally the case that one person losing weight contributes to the other people around them losing weight.'

Social eaters? Taken from the video diagram below; the yellow dots are obese people and the green dots are thin people, the lines between them represent family ties or friendships

At a basic level the results also seem to show that fatter people stick together, as do skinny people.
The research comes with a moving diagram which shows obese people - measured by a BMI greater than 30 - as yellow circles and thinner people as green circles.
The yellow circles gravitate towards each other, as do the green circles, particularly when they are linked by friendships and family ties.
In the diagram people are linked by purple lines - genetic family ties - and grey lines - friends and spouses.
The network of circles gets more dense as more ties appear between the circles, and the entire network gets heavier over time.
There are more obese people at the centre of the diagram, where there are more ties, while the people with fewer ties, towards the outside of the circle, are mostly thinner people.
NPR science blogger Jonah Lehrer said that the data shows that 'obesity spreads from person to person, much like a contagious virus'.

LINK TO VIDEO 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1382038/Do-friends-make-fatter-Thin-people-socialise-overweight-people-weight.html#ixzz1L89N7lwP

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