When Fat Attacks!

Chocolate_cupcake_sxc_not_cred

Yesterday a study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine all about how our social networks seem to influence whether we become obese - or lose weight (free full text if you want it). It was an opportunistic study that used the data from the 12,000 people in the long term Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts. For this particular analysis, they used 32 years worth of data.

By analyzing the BMIs of friends and family over time (who were given as emergeny or information contacts in the original questionnaires), the team found that people who gain weight seem to drag their friends with them.

My first reaction was, well OF COURSE that makes sense. Obesity, while containing a large genetic quotient, tends to be about lifestyle choices. Lifestyle choices tend to be shared by social circles; social circles tend to be in the same geographic or socio-economic neighborhood, which is also a predictor of obesity...and badda bing badda boom! A bunch of fat friends.

My interest was actually piqued upon reading the New York Times this morning, and finding they had a discussion board about the story they ran on the study yesterday.

The discussion board is TERRIFYING. I’ve read most of the comments; I COULD NOT PULL MY EYES AWAY. There certainly are a lot of people in America who are angry about obesity - either because they themselves feel attacked, stigmatized and blamed for their weight OR because they just want obese people to quit eating Ho-Hos and go for a walk already. In fact, many of commenters criticized the study because it was just so OBVIOUS, that it couldn’t possibly be, like a REAL cause of obesity or whatever. There were few level heads to go around.

A large portion of writers were angry about this study because they found it to be, yet again, more blame, another reason to steer clear of fat people and rightfully mock them. One person said they felt like they might wake up tomorrow and have less friends. Others attacked the study as pseudo-science, anecdotal bullshit, STOOPID (sic). One man even demanded that the lead author pay back the money he received to conduct the study.

Most seemed particularly angered by the use of the word “contagious”. And I agree, it might not have been the most prudent choice of words from the NYTimes. And suggesting you ditch your fat friends is, urm, kind of mean. But what is shocking about the scaling up smaller social experiments on eating habits to a longitudinal, epidemiological approach?

I mean:

1) This study from 2006 found that people eat more when they are in the company of their friends, not strangers or alone.
2) Or take this 1994 study, which found that family dinners are larger than solitary meals, and friend-social dinners are larger and of longer duration than solitary meals; and longer duration meals = more food intake.
3) Meals size increases by a power function to the number of co-eaters and we can eat up to 75% more with lots of friends or family compared to when we are alone.

It’s not to say that fat is contagious, but social forces are obviously HUGELY powerful determinates of how much we eat, when and where. And just as important a part of understanding the rise in obesity as genetics, food availability, portion sizes, the shift to more sedentary jobs, cars and suburbs. And lambasting a study because it made you FEEL BAD, is not appropriate criticism.

Posted by Anna Gosline on July 26, 2007 at 1:05 PM in health

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Actually, the propensity of the general public to lambast science (as it appears in newspapers) is shocking in general. A colleague wrote a paper about how the rotational pole of Mars might have shifted, and how this might explain the evidence of water there in the past. You should have seen the TERRIFYING discussion board on the globeandmail.com . People vilified the scientists and ranted about their doubts about climate change, which of course, is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT.

That’s why I’m so pleased there’s an Inky Circus.

(But I wholeheartedly agree that “lambasting a study because it made you FEEL BAD, is not appropriate criticism").

Posted on July 27, 2007 at 9:05 AM by

That IS terrifying. I usually don’t pay much attention to the studies coming out about the state of science literacy in North America; I honestly think that most people are rational, logical and were explained the scientific method in high school. But then you read a discussion board like that and are just amazed.

I am amazed. Also at the number of people claiming to be PhDs and MDs making somewhat spurious attacks.

It also seemed like a missed opportunity for the researchers themselves to answer back about the seeming misinterpretation of their work, the limits and what it really means. I realize they couldnt’ do it for discussion boards everywhere - but the New York Times at least!

Posted on July 27, 2007 at 12:42 PM by anna

It’s piqued, not peaked.

Posted on July 30, 2007 at 2:04 PM by

I constantly wonder why they pay me to be a journalist. Not, erm, for my spelling or grasp of homonyms.

Posted on July 30, 2007 at 2:09 PM by

I did a weight loss program once with a friend, and we wanted to make a plan to reward ourselves once we’d acheived what we set out to. It took us the longest time to think of a reward that didn’t involve food, as every social fun treat I could think of was related to eating. Suddenly I began to see why I might needed the weight loss program in the first place…

Posted on July 31, 2007 at 11:51 AM by

I think people see it as an excuse to shun and avoid those who are overweight for whatever reason. And using the study for that purpose or publicizing the study as “you ought to avoid your fat friends” is terrible, too.

Posted on August 02, 2007 at 10:06 PM by donna

The actual study only found this effect in the men, not in the women. And the “study” was performed by creating a computer model of the social networks of the patients, with much tweaking, in their efforts to find a pattern. It’s highly questionable how reliable this data is, and it’s a little dismaying that so few are questioning it.

This study has been dissected in quite a few places, including Junkfood Science:

“What did they find? None of the odds ratios their computer model came up with were tenable. But they didn’t simply admit the null findings. Instead, they reported that obesity was associated less with genetic, familial ties; less with geographical proximity, as in immediate neighbors or even friends hanging out together socially; less with even being married and living, eating and sleeping together; than in simply being friends with a fat person. [But among the fine print: the weight gain of a fat friend wasn’t “contagious” if the friends were the opposite sex or among two females; the finding was only statistically significant among men.]”

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/07/oh-what-tangled-web-we-weave-sir-walter.html

http://tinyurl.com/3aa267

Read the whole thing. It’s interesting.

Posted on August 20, 2007 at 10:08 AM by

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