The Vine

According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, your friends can make you fat. So can your siblings or spouse, although less so. (Your neighbors, apparently, cannot.)

Among the 12,000+ people monitored over a 30-year span:

A person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40%. If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37%. These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location.

The study’s conclusion: “Obesity appears to spread through social ties.”

The full report is here. For a more humorous commentary, go here instead.

Chris Waugh illustrated these network effects in his fantastic talk at The Vine, drawing upon IDEO’s work with the CDC to counteract youth obesity, including the powerful (and poignant) example of Pie Ranch.

Kudos also to Dr. Richard Jackson, who introduced this topic two years ago at our inaugural meeting. Jackson addressed the impact of the built environment on our health and wellness, and he showed us the alarming medical and societal ramifications of obesity — to name just one: the airline industry burns an additional 350 million gallons of fuel per year because of overweight passengers — exacerbated by neighborhoods designed for cars, not humans.

This is not to let individuals off the hook. Certainly your health is, first and foremost, your responsibility.

But the influence of your community — both social and physical — appears to be profound.