Are Your Fat Friends Making You Fat?

Are you mistaking free meals for generosity and friendship?

You may be the victim of “supersizing” by your overweight friends.

A recent 30-year study conducted by New England Journal of Medicine online entitled, The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network, found that having an obese friend makes a person more than 50% likely to become obese too.

The researchers found clusters of obese friends in the network, but not because they were drawn to each other as obese people, culturally. Nor was it because the thin people were biologically predestined to become obese.

The clusters emerged as the originally thin people began to change their eating habits, quite drastically, over time.

NEJM stated that the relevancy of this study was that, simply stated, obesity spreads through social ties.