The prevalence of obesity has increased from 23% to 31% over the recent past in the United States, and 66% of adults are overweight. In order to better understand this phenomenon, the authors in this study performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.The authors evaluated a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. The body-mass index was available for all subjects. They used longitudinal statistical models to examine whether weight gain in one person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbors.
The image shown here depicts the largest connected subcomponent of the social network in the year 2000. This network is sufficiently dense to obscure much of the underlying structure, although regions of the network with clusters of obese or non-obese persons can be seen. Each circle (node) represents one person in the data set. There are 2200 persons in this subcomponent of the social network. Circles with red borders denote women, and circles with blue borders denote men. The size of each circle is proportional to the person's body-mass index. The interior color of the circles indicates the person's obesity status: yellow denotes an obese person (body-mass index) and green denotes a non-obese person. The colors of the ties between the nodes indicate the relationship between them: purple denotes a friendship or marital tie and orange denotes a familial tie.
Discernible clusters of obese persons were present in the network at all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective formation of social ties among obese persons. 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. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account for the spread of obesity in the network.
