Obesity is a serious problem here in Syracuse. Obese people suffer many serious negative consequences such as an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and emotional problems. And so initiatives to fight obesity are common here.
The problem of obesity is so serious here in Syracuse that a Commission for a Healthy Central New York report has stated "Overweight and obesity unanimously topped the list of every member as a health priority that required further community action," http://bit.ly/ksgWxd. Now it appears one manner to fight obesity may be to hang around with friends who promote healthy lifestyles. Rachael Rettner has reported for MyHealthNewsDaily "How Obesity Spreads Among Friends", http://bit.ly/kUp7jk.
A new study has shown that obesity is known to spread socially not because friends share ideas about acceptable body size, but instead because friends share environments and carry out activities together which may contribute to weight gain. Shared social behaviors such as eating out at restaurants, and shared surroundings, appear to play a bigger role in this obesity "friend effect" than do shared social norms. This study has gone on to suggest how public health officials can most effectively fight obesity.
It has been found that interventions which attempt to change people's ideas about how fat or thin they should be may not be very effective. Study researcher Alexandra Brewis has said "What people think about others' bodies is not that important to protecting them against weight gain. There's a lot of assumption that you can shame people into losing weight through social pressure. That strategy is probably not going to work very well."
The researchers have concluded that instead anti-obesity efforts should focus on promoting healthy environments such as making people's neighborhoods nicer places to take walks and increasing access to healthy foods. Brewis has gone on to comment "We need to focus on what people do together, rather than what people think."
In this study it was found that obesity spreads in social networks. Among 101 women initially interviewed in this study the women were 2.4 times more likely to be obese if their friends were obese. And these women were 3.6 times more likely to be obese if their close friends were obese. The researchers also found an insignificant amount of support for the hypothesis that friends' shared views about acceptable body size are what causes obesity.
The women who participated in this study tended to prefer not to be obese. As a matter of fact many of the women in the study said they would rather have another socially stigmatizing condition than be obese. A quarter of the women said they would rather be depressed, 14.5 percent said they would rather be totally blind and almost half of the women said they would rather lose five years of their life.
Photographer: AKARAKINGDOMS
Mandel News Service
