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 ^[1] to read the report in full.