Washington, July 25: Do you have a big belly? Well, one of the key
reasons behind the extra flab could be your friends, says a new research, which
found that spending time with fat people can increase a person’s chances of
becoming obese.
According to the study, which was conducted by University of Warwick
researchers, people are influenced by the weight of those around them without
being aware of it, leading to a ''spiral of obesity''.
The study suggests that people are powerfully but subconsciously influenced by
the weight of those around them. Without being aware of it, the researchers
believe, human beings keep up with the weight of the people in their company.
The study has been presented at a National Bureau of Economic Research
conference in Cambridge Massachusetts in a paper entitled Imitative Obesity and
Relative Utility at the NBER Summer Institute on Health Economics.
Using data on 27,000 Europeans from 29 countries, the researchers find that
nearly half of European women feel overweight. Less than a third of males feel
overweight.
The authors suggest that whether for reasons of job promotions or finding a mate
it is someone’s weight relative to others that matters. They show that
overweight perceptions and dieting decisions are influenced by people’s
comparisons with others of the same age and gender.
Highly educated Europeans hold themselves to a particularly tough standard, the
research shows. For any given level of Body Mass Index (BMI), somebody with a
university degree feels much fatter than someone with low educational
qualifications.
Overall, the researchers believe that a person’s "utility" (an economic term
roughly meaning satisfaction levels) depends on their own weight relative to the
weight of those around them. They suggest that it is easier to be fat in a
society that is fat.
However, the authors also found a significant gender split.
Females were much more prone, for any given BMI value, to feel overweight. For
European women, weight dissatisfaction and overweight perceptions depended
crucially upon not just their own absolute BMI, but also upon their BMI relative
to other women of exactly the same age in their country. Conversely, being
overweight tended not to be a significant issue for men if many of those around
them were as overweight as they were.
Professor Andrew Oswald at the University of Warwick, one of the researchers,
said "Consumption of calories has gone up but that does not tell us why people
are eating more. Some have argued that obesity has been produced by cheaper
food, but if fatness is a response to greater purchasing power, why do we
routinely observe that rich people are thinner than poor people?"
He said: "A lot of research into obesity, which has emphasized 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." (ANI)
