Ruddy hell! We thought Swine Flu was the only thing we had to worry about catching this Christmas, now a new book called ‘Connected’ suggests we can ‘catch’ obesity too!
Harvard brainiacs Christakis and Fowler mapped the social networks of 12,067 people and found that overweight people are more likely to be friends with other overweight people, whilst thin people are more likely to be friends with other thin people.
Moreover, the authors found that this doesn’t just apply to our close-knit circle of friends but also to the friends of our friends, even those living 1000s of miles away!
It seems that it isn’t BMI or government warnings or even fashion magazines that set the standard of what is or isn’t a normal weight but a norm that becomes socially accepted and spreads from person to person in the same social network.
This explains how us obese Fatvillians look calmly at all of the lovely ‘normal’ sized people surrounding us (including our one-time acquaintances on Facebook) and feel safe in the knowledge that everybody else looks just like us!