What are friends for? And what are they not for? Do friends help you to be healthy? Or are your friends making you fat? This is a question science is researching and it pays to know the answers they are coming up with.

Back in 2007 social scientist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University and Professor James Fowler of University of California San Diego, revealed that being fat is contagious, meaning you catch it through contact. Now that’s a bit astounding don’t you think?

And it’s not just your friends that can make you fat – their friends’ friends can too. So even three times removed from your immediate circle you can react by becoming fatter yourself. Really? That seems far fetched. How is this supposed to happen?

Well, these findings have been confirmed in multiple populations.

In 2009 Christakis and Fowler published their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. They were following up with members of the famous Framingham Heart Study, begun in 1948, and that now includes the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of the original participants. Their study showed that obesity was socially transmissible. Research shows we do what our social group does.

But hang on, surely free will and self direction come into play too? Aren’t I responsible for what I put in my mouth, not to mention how much exercise I get and what I think and believe? Well, yes, of course I am. But the company I keep will make it harder or easier to stay on my path to health and fitness, according to research. Hmm, I can’t argue with that statement.

So how do people “infect” each other with fatness? One way is by imitation, or more accurately mirroring. Research on mirror neurons includes brain scans that show when you watch someone else doing an activity your brain activity mirrors theirs. You are firing up the same areas in your brain as they are, so when they are chewing, your own muscles for chewing are firing up too. So the more you hang around people who eat a lot the more your brain is firing up and priming you to do the same.

Your Eating Companions – In the experiments conducted during the research, it was found that people who sat next to big eaters would eat more than when sitting next to light eaters. And you may have noticed meeting friends over a smorgasbord lunch or dinner almost guarantees everyone will eat more than they need in terms of replenishing energy expended.

My mother was good at making sure you ate more than you needed for health. I clearly remember visiting as an adult with my own family and having meals at Mum’s. She would constantly urge us to “eat, eat” as if we had been starved since the last time we had visited. This urging was considered being a good hostess in my Mum’s European culture. And yes, her friends were short and round, just like her.

What’s Normal – It seems social norms play a part too. Over 60 per cent of Australians are overweight or obese, so that has become our norm. It is no longer unusual to see heavy people all around us in our daily life and to be eating with them. The more often we eat with them the more likely we will be influenced by their behaviour and their choices. The number of “healthy eaters” have been surpassed by “unhealthy eaters”, so those trying to stay healthy are now a minority.

Trying to lose weight while spending time and socializing with overweight people is like a smoker trying to give up smoking while amongst smokers – almost impossible.

So do we have to drop our friends to become healthy? Maybe! We may have to choose to meet them over a cup of tea and not at mealtime, or meet them for a tea or coffee straight after lunch so they are too full to eat in our presence.

We know it can be impossible for an alcoholic to have one drink and stop at that, just as it can be difficult for a choc-aholic to stop at one chocolate. Some people are junk-aholics, or carb-aholics, or sugar-holics, or just food-aholics, and if you hang around with them you can succumb to their influence.

But birds of a feather flock together as the saying goes, and we humans also tend to congregate with people like ourselves. So if you are health conscious among people health unaware or not interested in health issues, and find your values not supported, dismissed or undermined, then you will make a choice – to stay or go.

It wont be long before you find you don’t have enough in common to stay, and you’ll move on to another group, or you’ll consciously or unconsciously change your values to be like the others, to fit in and belong.

I’ve noticed that bike riders all congregate at favourite breakfast locations, especially on weekend mornings. They are all slim and healthy looking. They all eat a hearty breakfast. So I have no doubt that exercising as they do allows them to eat as they do, without gaining weight. But not so for other patrons, who indulge the eating side without the burning up energy by exercising side, with the obvious long-term results of getting bigger.

Who we choose to eat with regularly can have as big an influence as who we choose to exercise with. So your friends can make you fat, at least they can model the habits and behaviours and you get to choose to succumb or not.

And there is still the concept that the friends of our friends friends can influence us, even if we never meet them. I’ll cover that part of the research another time.
Cheers
Anna McRobert
(also see Nov 2010 Newsletter & article Who You Hang Out With Counts)