Food for Fat
Posted on July 26th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 20 Comments »
I’m fatinatedâwhoops, fascinatedâby the new Harvard study showing that obesity can be spread through social networks.
Obesity appears to spread from one person to another like a virus or a fad, researchers reported yesterday in a first-of-its-kind study that helps explain — and could help fight — one of the nation’s biggest public health problems.
…”It’s almost a cliche to speak of the obesity epidemic as being an epidemic. But we wanted to see if it really did spread from person to person like a fashion or a germ,” said Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School, who led the study, being published tomorrow in the New England Journal of Medicine. “And the answer is, ‘Yes, it does.’ We are finding evidence for a kind of social contagion.”
Of course, this makes perfect common sense. If you hang out with fat people, you’re likely to do what they doâeat more, exercise less, etc. Or at least, you’re more likely to do that stuff than if you’re hanging out with mountain bikers, yoga practitioners, and marathon runners.
There’s some debate over whether this survey just proves the obvious. (Answer: Yes.) I also assume that fat people self-select and hang out with each other because they’re less likely to feel social judgment about their weight. And, if they feel like eating a lot, then they’ll have company likely to do the same, and that’s just more fun than eating a lot around someone who’s having a hot water with lemon.
The Washington Post concludes its article on the survey with this paragraph:
The researchers cautioned that people should not sever relationships with friends who have gained weight or stigmatize obese people, noting that close friendships have many positive health effects. But the results do support forming relationships with people who have healthful lifestyles.
Hmmm. Sounds to me like those two sentences come close to contradicting each other. If you spend more time hanging out with healthy people, aren’t you likely to spend less time hanging out with fat people?
20 Responses
7/26/2007 10:50 am
I think the more interesting feature of this is the idea that thoughts and habits of mind can pass from person to person without conscious control or awareness — and perhaps without even a subconscious awareness. The influence of one person upon another in this regard may be more chemical/biological than social/psychological. To focus on whether one should have fat friends or not misses, I think, the really interesting possibility: that our minds and behavior are not as firmly under our own sway as we like to think. If being fat can spread like a virus, why not other behaviors, like aggressiveness, cynicism, narcissism, self-righteousness, etc.? I see a whole new field of research here.
7/26/2007 11:12 am
Makes sense to me. But is it really so surprising? Isn’t this the married couple finishing each other’s sentences phenomenon, somewhat more subtly manifested?
7/26/2007 11:14 am
Or people who end up looking like their dogs?
7/26/2007 11:17 am
My dog is better looking than me. Obviously something isn’t working.
7/26/2007 11:38 am
Keep an eye on it, it may become uglier.
7/26/2007 11:46 am
Anon 10:50 — this is hardly a new field of research. If memory serves, this is the whole focus of Erving Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Every Day Life,” which was written in the 1950s.
7/26/2007 12:06 pm
or Auden
7/26/2007 1:45 pm
In case anyone’s interested, Brian Wansink at Cornell (and a Stanford grad) published a fascinating book earlier this year called “Mindless Eating.” His work focuses on the unconscious clues that often dictate how much (or how little) we eat. His experiments are fascinating: how much soup would you eat if your bowl constantly refilled? would you eat more popcorn, even if stale, if it were in a larger container?
It’s an interesting read when paired with Christakis’ study.
7/26/2007 4:18 pm
I already knew all of that.
- God
7/26/2007 5:02 pm
God reads this blog? Truly, SITD has arrived.
7/26/2007 5:21 pm
Is Clapton still signing his posts that way? Lame.
7/26/2007 5:55 pm
And God certainly showed him, didn’t He?
7/26/2007 6:24 pm
I’ve taken over for Clapton.
- Jack White (aka God)
7/26/2007 8:15 pm
isn’t there a logical fallacy in the Harvard study? If obesity is contagious, shouldn’t healthy eating also be? and if it should be then should non-obese be as likely too become obese because they hang out with them as obese should be as likely to become non-obese from haning out with them… something does not add up here.
and what’s this obsession with obesity anyway? is this fixation on the shape of the body a displacement for much more serious disfunctions of the soul?
7/26/2007 8:21 pm
I think the obsession with obesity has to do with the fact that it’s an extremely serious health problem. Leads to high blood pressure, heart problems, and so on. I see it in my neighborhood all the time….
7/27/2007 10:31 am
Actually, the study DOES show that if a close friend loses weight, you’re more likely to, as well.
From the NY Times article:
“The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, the investigators say. But since most people were gaining, not losing, over the 32 years, the result was, on average, that people grew fatter.”
7/27/2007 11:24 am
I can think of at least two stronger reason besides long-term health that people are interested in fatness.
-The people who consume the most ‘news’ media are often of an age group and lifestyle that make them likely to have weight problems. So you get a ‘there but for the grace of God lumber I’ effect.
-Like race, you can identify obesity immediately in people you encounter. Unlike race (but like homosexuality), there is a behavioral aspect to it that makes moralistic judgment of those people seem justified.
The mutually causal and contradictory interaction of 1 and 2 should be the subject of thousands of sociological studies, although I’m afraid sociologists punt to psychologists who punt to ethicists (whatever those are).
And here’s a bonus third reason:
- The people who consume the most ‘news’ media (and here I’m thinking specifically of glossy newsweeklies, the Today Show, and similar) are of an age group and lifestyle that correlate with relatively hazy thinking about causality and about larger meaning. (Consider how much white-collar leisure time is spent alone in a car, if you’re interested in supposing that lifestyle causes rather than just being correlated with muzziness — although I’m not sure that such consideration isn’t the same kind of pop sociology I’m deploring.)
My evidence for this is actually pretty strong, I think: how well must Time and Newsweek do with their covers about Angels, the Virgin Mary, and so on, to keep coming back to them as they do? I’m guessing it scratches the itch; and I’m guessing this study will lead to a rash of stories positing and speculating about pretty suspect vectors of causality.
In a word, poorly understood science (by which I don’t mean the science itself) is a very slightly upscaled modernization of superstition (fairies, angels, just-so stories from all centuries). Fat-engenders-fat is much like witches causing frost, or whatever. Note for example in the story above how the sociological term of art ‘predictor’ is bandied about as if it meant people could actually make individual Tarot-style predictions about someone’s career based on their weight. (The study does of course mean that one can update percentages that way, but that’s not how people use the word ‘predict’ colloquially.)
A serious Christian himself, with no shortage of sedentariness — so call me mean but don’t call me condescending —
Standing Eagle
7/27/2007 11:54 am
Pedantry becomes meaninglessness.
7/27/2007 1:11 pm
I would add a fourth, and perhaps even stronger, reason why this captures the attention of so many people: Americans see weight as a moral issue. That is, the predominant thinking seems to be that thin people are “good”; fat, “bad.”
While I totally disagree with this mode of thinking (in the interest of anonymously full disclosure, I’m a weight loss coach when not wandering the hallowed halls of Harvard), this thinking is pervasive, and insidious. To quote from SE’s post, “there is a behavioral aspect to it that makes moralistic judgment of those people seem justified.” (Sorry, SE, but this type of thinking gets me fired up. “Seem” is the operative word there, and makes me hopeful that you do not give into such ready judgment of “those people.”)
Listen to others, or yourself, discuss food. “Good” and “bad” more often refer to some moralistic judgment of same (is this a virtuous choice, or a gluttonous one?) than to analysis of taste…usually in polar opposition to each other. Cookies are “bad” (but oh-so-good) and carrots are “good” (and we can feel virtuous that we’re eating a shaved down bit of orange fiber, water, and nutrients while pining for the aforementioned cookie).
Armed with that perspective, it seems that the fascination with fat- and thin-ness comes down to people equating physical appearance with personal (and moral) character.
This study does seem, as Richard points out, to prove the obvious: that the weight and food-choice norms held by our social networks will influence our own weight norms and eating behavior. But to me, it also hints at this underlying morality hypothesis: if my best friend becomes overweight or obese, and I still consider her to be a “good” person, then I would be forced to rework my concept of “goodness” as it relates to her weight…and my own.
Are people in control of their choices about food and health? Yes, of course. But, and here I note again the work of Brian Wansink I mentioned in an earlier post, we are often not even aware of the choices we’re making. His work, for example, shows that if you’re with people who are eating a lot, you will eat more-but your perception of fullness is the same as when you eat less in the presence of people who are eating less. Your morality doesn’t ever come into play-your only hope lies in your awareness and response to the fact that, when surrounded by people who may be overindulging, you’re more likely to overindulge as well.
The prevalence and power of unconscious elements don’t justify overeating, I agree, but it sure as heck doesn’t make losing weight, or maintaining a healthy weight, any easier.
So the challenge is to be acutely aware and to sift through the cues, studies, and other information available to us from multinational food corporations, agribusiness, our social networks, and our government and just try and make healthier choices, when even those are a moving target.
But success on that front doesn’t come from moral superiority, it comes from knowledge, and the effective use of that knowledge.
The limited access to non-lobbyist funded food information and recommendations, particularly for those whose food choices are dictated in large part by the government through food stamps, etc. (and who, not incidentally, suffer from obesity and overweight in disproportionate numbers to the educated and monied classes), is a topic for another day.
Soapbox dismantled.
7/27/2007 2:49 pm
1:11 -
Very good post. And yes, I meant ‘seem’ to be the operative word, and meant to link anti-fat prejudice with homophobia.
Whether it’s due to lack of practice or moral laziness, though, I’m probably more guilty of the former than I should be (plenty of gay people, not so many obese people at Harvard).
SE