"BOSTON--Becoming obese isn’t like catching a cold, but a handful of research groups are now trying to model obesity in a population by treating it like a “social contagion” that spreads among people through their interactions...
Q: How did this idea of modeling obesity as a contagion come about?
K. E.: The first paper was published in 2007 by [Nicholas] Christakis and [James] Fowler. … They found that the obesity can be transmissible through social networks. During my Ph.D. course, I was working on mathematical modeling of infectious disease. When I read their paper, I thought, “I can apply my mathematical techniques to describe the obesity epidemic model.”
Q: In what way is obesity a “social contagion”?
D. T.: If you’re somebody who loves to go to the gym and loves to eat healthy, it’s unlikely that you’re going to draw in a circle of friends that love to smoke cigarettes and love to eat at fast food restaurants. You’re going to kind of surround yourself and emulate the behavior of a cluster around you. There is some experimental evidence for that.
D. A.: I want to just be clear that actually there is a hypothesis out there, supported by some data, that certain microbes—particularly adenoviruses—do contribute to obesity, and in that sense, it would be contagious in the more literal sense of spreading viruses from one person to another. So we don’t want to dismiss that..."
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