Is Obesity Contagious?

If you ask most folks, they’ll tell you that when they see someone who is beyond merely heavy, their appetite declines from the negative image. Others might add that seeing obesity doesn’t trigger much of anything in their appetite patterns. Well, according to a new study released by the University of Colorado, both categories of individuals above would be wrong. Margaret C. Campbell (Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder) and Gina S. Mohr (also at the Boulder campus) reported the results of a series of consumer experiments under the title, Seeing is Eating: How and When Activation of a Negative Stereotype Increases Stereotype-Conducive Behavior, Journal of Consumer Research: October 2011 (published online March 17, 2011).

The April 20^th Time.com summarizes two of the experiments: “Campbell and Mohr put together a series of five experiments to determine the impact of the mere sight of an overweight person. In the first, the researchers recruited people walking through a lobby on campus, and showed them pictures of either an overweight or normal-weight woman, or a lamp. The respondents, average age 25, were asked to rate the photos for a future studies (a sham task), and then were allowed to help themselves from a candy bowl as a ‘thank you’ for their time.

“Those who saw the photo of the overweight woman took significantly more candy (an average 2.2 pieces) than those who saw the normal-weighted woman or the lamp (an average 1.5 pieces)… The researchers' subsequent experiments involved ‘cookie taste tests.’ As in the first experiment, participants were first primed with photos of either overweight or normal-weight people, or a neutral image like a tree. Then they were asked to rate cookies by tasting at least one (but up to eight) cookies presented on a plate. People who gazed at pictures of the overweight woman ate significantly more cookies than those who were exposed to the thinner woman. The difference held up regardless of the participants' gender or weight.”

That “contagion” appears, accord to the study, to apply even where physical proximity is not present. People whose social networks have an abundance of friends with photographs of heavier people tend to be heavier as well. These results support a “seminal 2007 study by Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler, a political scientist at University of California, San Diego: According to their analysis, when a study participant's friend became obese, that first participant had a 57% greater chance of becoming obese himself. In pairs of people in which each identified the other as a close friend, when one person became obese the other had a 171% greater chance of following suit. ‘You are what you eat isn't the end of the story,’ says Fowler. ‘You are what you and your friends eat.’” Time.com. Uh oh….

I’m Peter Dekom, and I guess these scientists came up with these experiments while they were sitting around chewing the fat one day.