Fat friends lead to obesity
The increasing availability of cheap food has been found to have little influence on the spread of obesity.
An in-depth study by economists from the University of Warwick, Dartmouth College and the University of Leuven, has found that people are subconsciously influenced by the weight of their colleagues, friends and family, suggesting that it is “easier to be fat in a society that is fat”.
The analysis, entitled Imitative Obesity and Relative Utility, of 29 nations revealed that Europeans naturally try to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ – it is ‘acceptable’ to put on weight if one’s contemporaries do because it is no longer necessary to be slim in order to compete with them.
A further observation of the study showed that the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to feel overweight. This was also found to be particularly more common in female Europeans, of which over half (around 13,500 women) reported feeling overweight, compared with less than a third of men.
Professor Andrew Oswald, co-author of the report and a professor at the University of Warwick, was insistent that the study shed new light on the issue of obesity: “A lot of research into obesity, which has emphasised sedentary lifestyles or human biology or fast-food, has missed the key point. Rising obesity needs to be thought of as a sociological phenomenon not a physiological one. People are influenced by relative comparisons, and norms have changed and are still changing.”
The report also dismissed the common theory that the increase in availability of cheaper food has led to an increase in cases of obesity. As Professor Oswald explained: “If fatness is a response to greater purchasing power, why do we routinely observe that rich people are thinner than poor people?”
However, while the main crux of the report focused on the spread of imitative obesity, the economists also explained that this phenomenon can act in the opposite way – with people becoming increasingly thinner in an effort to increase their social status from that of their neighbour’s.
The paper will be published at the National Bureau of Economic Research conference in Cambridge Massachusetts. Click here to read the report in full.
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While I cannot deny various cause and effect relationships associated with our ever burgeoning obesity epidemic, it is significant to note that some of us encountered the condition totally exogenously without a preponderance of ‘fat friends’ — or any other causative possibility.
Caloric intake vis a vis expenditure deficit was my issue and I don’t recall ever having any ‘fat friends’ during childhood; having attained the label of ‘obeast’ long before it became a national tragedy.
The bottom line is I was able to alter the condition but I find in my old age pounding 5 miles of pavement a day is a bit too strenuous … or perhaps I simply lack motivation. Be all this as it may I have never savored the connotation of ‘pioneer fatty’ but that is precisely what I was … and am.
I have never been one to suffer the sling and arrows of public opinion and having that abject refusal to ‘follow the herd’ is the crux of the problem. I took the road less traveled and yes, it made a profound difference in the man that I have become.
July 25th, 2008 at 5:19 pm