Researchers find obesity is ‘contagious’

Doctors have blamed it on lack of exercise, unhealthy eating habits and lack of concern with one’s health. A new research however reveals that there might be more to obesity than its underlying medical aspects.

A study carried out by Andrew Oswald, professor within the economics department at Warwick, and Professor David Blanchflower, member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, has revealed that overweight people nowadays may be suffering from a phenomenon called “imitative obesity”.

The two economists based their research on a sample of 30,000 people from 29 European countries, and reached the conclusion that in a particular sense, obesity might be contagious.

One of the arguments was that “it may be easier to be fat in a society that is fat” the researchers told the Daily Mail. “A lot of research into obesity, which has emphasized sedentary lifestyles or human biology or fast-food, has missed the key point” they added, “rising obesity needs to be thought of as a sociological phenomenon, not a physiological one. People are influenced by relative comparisons, and norms have changed and are still changing.”

Oswald and Blanchflower used international micro data to document people’s BMI (body mass index) along with their levels of satisfaction. In their research paper entitled “Imitative Obesity and relative Utility”, they found a link between the two variables and concluded that wellbeing was often a result of a person’s BMI, in the sense that overweight people on average, tend to be unhappier. What led them to define the concept of “imitative obesity” was the fact that people often related their weight to that of people around them.

This tendency emerges from their preferences: “the concavity leads me to copy the increasingly fatter Jones family in the house opposite mine. But, if I have a convex utility function over the status from being slim, I will tend to act in the opposite way. When my neighbour becomes fatter, my marginal utility from slimness rises, and I invest more in slimness”.

As the number of overweight people increases, even those who once struggled to remain thin are swept away into the emerging culture and start to regard themselves as normal, even if they are in reality overweight. This becomes acceptable if the surrounding population is suffering of the same problem: “When my neighbour gets a little fatter, I become a little fatter since it is now not necessary to be so slim in order to compete” the researchers commented in their paper.

These findings could be confirmed in real life if people attempted to have an independent perception of their own weight, and as a result would succeed in losing weight.