Obesity is contagious: new confirmation of the old theory
In a study prepared by American scientists, it is argued that people are more likely to gain extra pounds if there are many neighbors.
The neighbors might infect you… obesity is confirmed by another study. The paper was published in the scientific journal JAMA Pediatrics authored by two American scholars.
Ashlesha Datar from the University of southern California and Nancy Nicosia from the RAND Corporation investigated the phenomenon of “social contagion” of obesity. As it turned out, people are more likely to gain extra pounds when around them there are many other overweight people.
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The object of the experiment, the scientists chose a group of a thousand families of American soldiers. A prerequisite was that they had children, and nobody in the family was overweight at the time of the observations. Career soldiers in the US are often forced to change their place of residence when transfer to other objects.
Scientists ranked all the USA in terms of percentage of residents with obesity and began to watch what will happen to those who moved to the “fed” States. As it turned out, living in a society more well-fed people had an impact on lean military families.