Читать книгу Nutrition For Dummies - Carol Ann Rinzler - Страница 52

The word epidemic conjures up images of polio, plague, flu, measles — a host of contagious illnesses that pass more or less easily from one person to another. But does obesity qualify? Believe it or not, maybe.

In 2007, Harvard sociologist Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, suggested in The New England Journal of Medicine that gaining weight may be a “socially contagious” event. In other words, people in groups tend to adopt similar behavior, and gaining or losing weight right along with friends and relatives may be one of those activities.

To reach this conclusion, Christakis and Fowler analyzed more than 30 years’ worth of information for more than 12,000 volunteers in the famed Framingham Heart Study, the project that has tracked the incidence and causes of heart disease in a Massachusetts city since 1948.

The Framingham people were weighed during checkups every two to four years. When Christakis and Fowler toted up the results, they discovered that the risk of becoming obese rose nearly 60 percent for someone with an obese friend, 40 percent for someone with an obese brother or sister, and 37 percent for someone whose husband or wife is obese. And these people didn’t even have to live close to each other for the risk to rise: The coincidence of obesity existed even when the subjects lived in different cities, which leads right to the next section, stats showing the cities and states where overweight Americans are most likely to be found.