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Science: If you want to stay slim and fit, choose your friends carefully
So, you fancy going for a drink? Madam, you’re reasonably engaging, but — oh dear — you’re carrying a few extra pounds around the waist. I don’t want to risk becoming lardy myself. In fact, I’m pretty sure I have to stay in and spend a long time shampooing my hair.
The idea that you can “catch” obesity from a friend seems faintly ridiculous, given that you have control over what you put in your mouth and how often you don your gym kit. But the concept of social contagion is, well, catching on among scientists. And that is largely on account of two American scientists, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who published a landmark study in 2007 charting how social networks affect health.
Using subjects in the Framingham Heart Study, which has followed about 15,000 people over five decades, the scientists deduced that a person’s chance of becoming obese rose by 57 per cent if a friend became obese.Not only that, but social contagion could skip a link: the risk of becoming obese rose by a fifth if a friend of a friend became obese. People still suffered a measurable rise in risk (10 per cent) if they were three degrees removed from the original owner of the expanding waistline, ie, if they were the friend of a friend of a friend.Social contagion also helps in the spread of smoking. That seems intuitive — isn’t it just peer pressure, the scourge of every parent? But what about the spread of happiness, which also seems subject to the same rules? How do happy people infect others?
Moods and behaviours seem to spread through a subconscious form of mimickry. We recalibrate our norms according to what we see our friends doing. If all your mates are having pudding, you think twice about hanging back from the calorific fun. How normal does your size 10 frame look, compared with your size 14 friends?Happiness is an interesting enigma because it doesn’t seem the sort of thing we should be able to copy. Either we have a life that leads us to feel joyous, or we don’t. Yet our brain harbours mirror neurons, which are cells devoted purely to mirroring the behaviour of others. It is mirror neurons that allow you to feel empathy with others; to make you cry when your best friend cries. When someone tells you that he feels your pain, it’s his mirror neurons that are doing the work.Fortunately, happiness seems more contagious than despondency; it has a 9 per cent chance of being passed on, compared with 7 per cent for unhappiness. This, social scientists claim, could be why people with large social networks are generally happier than those with highly pruned networks: many small, happy encounters add up to something more positive than fewer, more meaningful meet-ups (which might be intense, in a bad way).
The weird thing is, the contagion can skip a link. So if someone becomes obese, the friend of a friend might feel the effect but not the pal in the middle. It suggests that someone can pass on a social signal without succumbing to it.Not everyone believes in the concept that moods and behaviours are infectious. It could be that “homophily” — the idea that like prefers like — is at play. Fat people hang out with other fat people. Smokers seek out others who share their filthy habit. Another possible confounding factor is the environment: do friends get fatter because they are all heading to the newly opened fast-food restaurant around the corner? The consensus seems to be that social contagion is a clever scientific intuition that is backed partly, but not definitively, by the evidence.
Anyway, back to making new friends. A good-looking, intelligent guy rolls up and asks you out for a drink. He’s slim, fit, charming and ebullient. Say yes, but one word of advice: when he buys you a sex- on-the-beach cocktail, don’t tell him you are worried about catching something.
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