Health & Science

Thin Friends Can Make You Fat, Too

How is a social woman supposed to lose weight?

This summer, we learned some enlightening and also depressing news about weight gain. An article published in the New England Journal of Medicine claimed that fat friends can make you fat, even if you live thousands of miles away from them. Now comes another study that adds another confusing caveat to the whole subject. If you hang around thin people who overeat, you’re likely to copy them, too, concludes a recent article published in the Journal of Consumer Research. For those of us trying to watch our weight, who can we break bread with?

The first study about overweight friends got so much attention that it was seen as an important example of the emerging science of social contagion in which people “infect” one another with their good or bad behavior, in the same way a virus spreads. It is a commentary on friendship as much as weight gain; we mimic the people we know and love. But the second study suggests another powerful factor that doesn’t include that same footnote on friendship and love. Subjects in the study tended to mimic whatever the size zero woman in their midst was doing. The point is that we care so deeply about body image that we lose sight of our own cravings and appetite signals. The even more unsavory message is the strong prejudice young women have against their overweight peers.

In the “fat friends” study, researchers looked at the social ties among the 12,000 participants of the Framingham Heart Study over three decades, and found that a person’s chances of becoming fat increased 57 percent if they had a friend who had gained a significant amount of weight during a given period. How that happens isn’t clear. Do fat friends share more unhealthy food? Give each other permission to make another round at the buffet?

However, the “thin peers” study suggests that others influence what we eat based on how they look. Researchers at the University of British Columbia wanted to observe whether women would adjust their snacking behavior depending on whether the person next to them was thin or obese. In a series of experiments, 210 college undergraduate women who mostly had a normal body-mass index were told they would be participating in a study about movie-watching. During the fake screening, they were paired with a hired actress posing as a fellow student, and offered granola or candy. The actress, who was 5 feet 2 inches tall, weighed 105 pounds, and wore a size zero, always helped herself first. When she took a large portion, the majority of students copied her, regardless of whether she took the healthy or unhealthy food. But when the actress wore a fat suit, which made her look as if she weighed 180 pounds and wore a size 16, the students generally consumed a much smaller amount.

The conclusion: Women look to one another for social cues about eating, yet they take into account body size, adopting the behavior of the person whose physique they admire and distancing themselves from the behavior of the person they don’t. “They think, If the [thin person] eats it, so can I,” says assistant marketing professor and lead author Brent McFerran. “But if the person is heavy, they think, I better not eat so much.” Therefore, a person is more at risk of eating too much when she is around a thin person with a big appetite.

Tags: fat, size zero, thin, weight, weight loss

Sarah Elizabeth Richards is the author of Motherhood Rescheduled: Five Women, Five Quests to Stop the Biological Clock to be published in summer 2010. Get the latest by joining the mailing list at www.motherhoodrescheduled.com.

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