This may be literally true, according to Harvard researchers who suggested in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that obesity, or the trend to thinness, is socially contagious, "spreading" through social ties.
"This reinforces the idea that because people are interconnected, their health is interconnected," said study author Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor at Harvard University. "It takes seriously the embedded-ness of people within social networks and gives new meaning to the concept of public health."
While this may cause people to look differently at their friends and acquaintances (both overweight and thin), the real value of the research is in pointing to new ways to combat the growing epidemic of overweight and obesity, experts said.
"Trying to address the problem on an individual level has been so hard, and it may be because we're not addressing the network, which could be family, neighborhood, community, school," said Dr. Julio Licinio, chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. "This is a fascinating way to look at the problem, and it may be a very good reason why treatments have been so difficult, because we're only addressing one member of the network."
"It brings up another component of our environment that influences obesity," added Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "This would need to be proven, but it suggests that, to be effective in treating obesity, we have to not just treat the person who's obese but also the social network."
The study is likely to become a classic, experts stated.
The issue is of no small concern, since obesity has become a major public health problem in the United States and other Western nations. According to background information in the article, two-thirds of American adults are now overweight, while the prevalence of obesity has increased from 23 percent to 31 percent.
A variety of explanations have been put forth on the epidemic, including less exercising and more eating. But because the epidemic is so widespread and affects all socioeconomic groups, there are likely several social and environmental explanations for the phenomenon, experts said.
The authors speculated that the ubiquity of social networks, and the natural inclination of people to be influenced by the appearance and behaviors of those around them, suggest that weight gain in one person might encourage weight gain in others. Having social contacts of a certain bodily size may also cause you to adopt certain behaviors, or other people's behaviors may even stimulate certain parts of the brain, such as those related to eating food.
To investigate this theory, the authors of this study evaluated more than 12,000 socially interconnected people in New England who had participated in the Framingham Heart Study, a landmark initiative aimed at unearthing the causes of cardiovascular disease. As part of that study, the individuals had undergone repeated measurements including body mass index (BMI) over more than three decades. At the beginning of the study, participants had been asked to identify their friends for follow-up purposes.
The researchers found that thin and fat people tended to be clustered together, with the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. In other words, you're obese and so is you friend's friend's friend, or your friend's spouse's sister.
In addition, a person's odds of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who became obese over a certain time interval. If the two people were mutual friends, the odds increased to 171 percent.
And if one adult sibling became obese, the chances that the other sibling would also become obese increased by 40 percent.
Marriage mattered, too -- if a spouse became obese, the other spouse had a 37 percent increased likelihood of following suit.
Social networks were more important than geographic location, the study found. In other words, who you tend to hang out with is more influential, weight-wise, than who your next door neighbor is.
People of the same gender had a greater influence on each other than people of the opposite gender, the team found.
Finally, the researchers found that the trend among Americans to quit smoking did not account for the spread of obesity within a given network.
According to the study authors, there's much more involved in the phenomenon than just similarities in lifestyle and environment, as evidenced by the fact that social networks are more important than geography. Two likely explanations are the spread of behaviors and the spread of social norms, with evidence pointing more to the latter.
"To a point, it reminds me of peer pressure -- we want to fit into this particular group," said Dr. Juan Castro, director of the Texas A&M Health Science Center Coastal Bend Health Education Center in Corpus Christi.
Christakis agreed. When overweight or obesity becomes normal in a given social circle, people may be more likely to become obese themselves. In other words, he said, "I see you gaining weight, so it's OK for me to gain weight."
That finding may support efforts to provide nutrition education in the workplace, where many people find their friends, Castro said. There is also value in targeting interventions at the person in a family in charge of food buying and preparation, he added.
SO ARE YOU FIT?
CHECK YOURS.,
HAVE A FIT BODY..,
HAVE A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT...,
HAVE A HEALTHY WORLD....,
HAVE A NICE EXERCISE FROM TODAY ONWARDS.....OK...BYE
(ON OCCASION OF POST HEALTH DAY ON 25YH JULY)
FOR MORE SEE http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_52665.html
AND ALSO SEE 8.HEALTH GUIDE ON SIDE BAR
Thursday 26 July, 2007
*** FRIENDS DONT LET FRIENDS GET OBESE ***
WHO ARE TERRORISTS ?
FAKE DRUGS
No matter where you live - especially if it's in a developing country - beware of unscrupulous traders in fake drugs. When it comes to making a fast fortune, anyone is fair game, even the sick or the dying. We can also go one step further. If you're not dying already, these purveyors of malicious indifference would not hesitate in the least to provide you with the means of getting there. Children are no exception. Especially those afflicted with malaria in Africa where fake chloroquine may not just contain harmless ingredients but has actually been manufactured with aspirin in the formulation.
Giving aspirin to young children with life threatening malaria is like lighting a cigarette near a tankful of gasoline. The result can be disastrous because the aspirin might help bring on dangerous acidosis, and is also considered to be completely "verboten" because of its tendency to cause Reye's syndrome in children.
Writing in the April 6, 2002 issue of BMJ Newton, White, and Rozendaal provided some startling revelations about the subject in their editorial, aptly titled "Murder by fake drugs: Time for international action." This is scary enough but some of their illustrations of what is actually going on around the world are literally "hair raising." Malaria seems to be one of the major targets. When a survey was done of 133 vendors in Cambodia of mefloquine tablets for malaria back in 1999 the amazing figure of 60% of them were found to be providing fake medication. Many simply sold pills with nothing of value in them at all. Some at least gave pills, which had mefloquine in them, but the pills came from stocks that were supposed to have been destroyed.
The rest put sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine in their tablets instead of mefloquine because it's a good deal cheaper. However, it also doesn't work. The result is that people are failing to be helped, many are dying, and physicians are deluded into thinking that drug resistance is developing. Similarly, in mainland South East Asia, a survey of five countries found that 38% of tablets that were supposed to be the new antimalarial artusenate were actually fakes. Counterfeiters love drugs like this one because it's expensive, acts quickly, and is in great demand, so they go to a lot of trouble to prepare virtually exact copies of the package designs, even the holograms on them.
In the Philippines the World Health Organization reports, via a quote from Wondemagegnehu, that 8% of drugs that are bought are fakes, according to a survey of pharmacies. All in all, the WHO estimates that about 10% of all worldwide pharmaceuticals are actually fakes, and even worse, very little is being done about it. In the United States recently the spread of these malicious practices became apparent when it was reported that a drug dispenser was diluting anticancer medicines. Prior to that the appearance of fake drugs for cancer in the United States led to local action by the pharmaceutical industry in 2001. But most developing companies are unable to follow through due to lack of resources. Fortunately, a major effort may be in the works as the WHO and Reconnaissance International try to organize a united front against these practices. Also, various techniques for making drugs and their packaging harder to imitate, development of simple assays, policing and legal actions, education of the public, lowering the price of those drugs being copied, etc. are starting to make inroads into the trade, but we are a long way off from achieving success.
Until these horrible purveyors of misery and death can be stopped and brought to justice your best weapon for protecting your own families and yourselves is awareness. That's why this editorial in BMJ is so important and why I chose to review it for you. Now it's up to you to be wary. Never purchase your medications from anywhere but reliable sources, always be suspicious if a medication fails to do what it is supposed to do, be sure that the packaging is proper and intact when purchased, and report any of your suspicions or findings to your physician and the proper authorities.
| Whom can you trust when you're feeling low? You must never give in to a whim or a vibe, |
FOR MORE DETAILS SEE 16. FAMILY TIPS (SIDE BARS)
http://www.familiesonlinemagazine.com/
