VitaMist Weight Loss Products

Health Tip


Our Weekly Health Tip is often focused on weight management and we are frequently asked to cover this subject on our Saturday Morning Product Focus calls.

Recently, we came across some interesting research on the social aspects of weight gain and obesity. This new wave of research is showing that weight gain and a variety of other health-related behaviors have a social dimension, spreading through social networks as if they were contagious. Social networks are the vast webs of relationships we find ourselves in: friends and relatives; their friends and relatives; the friends and relatives of those friends and relatives, and so on.

Network analysis has roots in sociology, anthropology, mathematics, and several other disciplines. Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard Medical School professor, and James Fowler, a University of California political scientist, have applied the techniques from those fields to health-related issues. They started by painstakingly mapping out a social network based on information supplied by participants in the famous Framingham Heart Study.

Their work has piqued people's interest partly because of some unexpected twists. For example, their obesity study found that your friend's obese friend may increase your chances of becoming obese, even if your friend is not heavy.

How behavior could follow infectious patterns is uncertain, although Christakis and Fowler say subtle social messages of acceptance may get passed along from one person to another. Some say social network researchers are leveraging interesting correlations into causation. A related criticism is that network research has dressed up the time-honored observation that in social matters, like attracts like: clusters of behavior form because we are favorably disposed toward people who behave like we do. Regardless, viewing health-related behavior as a collective phenomenon is fascinating and opens up new avenues for research and experiments in intervention.