A new study suggests that tweens and teens may be influenced to eat more or less depending on how much their friends weigh.

The study tracked 130 kids between the ages of 9 and 15. Study participants were allowed to snack as much as they wanted while hanging out with either a friend or a peer they didn't know.

Clear trends emerged: all the kids ate more with friends than they did with strangers. Overweight kids ate the most when paired with an overweight friend (an average of 300 more calories than when they were with friends who were not overweight), and overweight kids who ate with similar-weight friends ate about 250 more calories than when they ate with overweight kids they didn't know.

Researchers believe that this data suggests that obesity is a social behavior, and as such can be contagious.

The study, which appeared in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is not the first to suggest that obesity may be a communicable behavior. In 2007, Harvard researchers reviewed 32 years' worth of data on 12,000 people and found that individuals with an obese spouse are 37 percent more likely to become obese, individuals with an obese sibling are 40 percent more likely to become obese and individuals with a friend who becomes obese are 57 percent more likely to also become obese.

(Source: www.time.com)

Labels: obesity