Obesity is spreading like a virus -- literally. According to recent analyses of thousands of participants over three decades, you're more likely to get fat if your friends do. Looking at obesity as a sort of social contagion may even help explain why the weight of America's residents has suddenly ballooned over the last generation.
Sound farfetched? Well, not according to Nicholas A. Christakis, physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, and a principal investigator of a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that tracked a large social network of 12,067 people between 1971 and 2003. Unlike most studies of its kind, which only record the relationship of an individual and his/her contacts, the
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