Friends Make Friends Gain Weight

Every once in a while I really wonder about the studies that are being conducted all the time by medical professionals. Some of these studies are really subjective and could swing either way. I remember that at one time doctors announced that popcorn was considered a healthy snacking alternative. Suddenly people were buying buckets of the stuff at the movies; even if they didn't want to actually eat it. What the reports on the study didn't say was that this was normal, butter-less popcorn. Not the stuff drowning in salt and butter at the movies. Of course the general population could care less for the details but suddenly new studies came out that stated that popcorn wasn't as healthy as initially thought; especially movie theatre popcorn. Overnight the industry went in the opposite direction and there you suddenly had change.

There are so many such studies that if you wait long enough you will likely find one that suits your style. Like coffee? Coffee is good for preventing heart disease. Don't like coffee? Coffee is bad because it promotes caffeine overload. You can play this game all the time and then you begin to wonder, have the doctors and researchers conducting these studies actually done anything? I mean have we reached an actual conclusion or are we taking a step forward and then a step back so that we end up in the same place again? Not only do these cases and studies never seem to reach any conclusion but they often delve into the realm of the most obvious. I can understand if these results come from something like the Cecil County Community College of Junk Food Medicine but from a prestigious journal like the New England Journal of Medicine? I think not yet it happened.

In a study published earlier this week, the New England Journal of Medicine found that studies had shown that the general disposition of your friends was a good indicator of your lifestyle. Yes, you read correctly, you are like your friends. In this case, the similarity had to do with weight gain or general fitness levels. The study concluded that if you have friends of the same sex who are overweight or begin to gain weight, you will likely experience the same gain. Now I'm probably going to be out on a limb here for asking this but shouldn't that have been extremely obvious? I mean of course you'll have things in common with your friends! I don't think it should have taken a study by doctors at places like Harvard to reach that conclusion.

I mean look at other cases besides obesity. If you smoke, likely you'll have friends who smoke. If you drink, you'll have friends who drink. The connection of this sort can go on and on forever. This is mostly because we like to hang out with people who have similar interests. Again, shouldn't that have been obvious? If I don't like to smoke would I be hanging out with someone who does? By that same token, if I didn't see eating as anything more than a necessity for survival would I hang out with people who lived to eat? Probably not. So it stands to reason that the reason I hang out with someone is because I have similar interests to them.

I'm not saying that there isn't any importance or good conclusion to this study but I just feel that it's an exercise in finding out what we already knew. And again, I find that it is an easy out for many people. What I mean is that now that there is scientific, medical reasoning behind the fact that weight gain is likely linked to your friends, many people are not finding motivation will have yet another scapegoat to their lack of physical fitness. "I didn't exercise because Kelly didn't exercise. We both decided to have a milkshake instead." The actual motivation is within each of us, it's just a question of how to get it out of you. I guess soon we'll find a study that says that there is a link between friends and their physical fitness level. There. I've gone and given some med-student the thesis for his final paper.