Friendship counts, even in obesity

BOSTON: Let me rise (from the breakfast table) in defense of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. The doctor and the political scientist were used to having a rather meager portion of academic attention. But now their cup and their inbox runneth over with charges of hate-mongering, size-ism and fat discrimination. They've been held personally responsible for increasing the social ostracism of the obese.

The research documenting the spread of the obesity epidemic from friend to friend to friend leapt from the peer-reviewed, sober annals of the New England Journal of Medicine to the front pages of newspapers everywhere. The message was that fat is contagious. This was reinforced by catchy and catching headlines that declared: "Your Friends Really Are Making You Fat," and "Your Friends May Be to Blame" and ... well you get the idea.

Christakis and Fowler did not use the word "contagious" in their paper. Nor did they use the word "blame." But crunching the numbers of a long-term study of people who live in a suburb near me - yipes - they found that people were more likely to become obese when a friend became obese. And most likely to upsize when a "close mutual friend" went up. Their point was that social networks counted a lot more than family or neighbors.