Here is another study of the week:
Study: Obesity is Socially Contagious
People who notice their friend packing on pounds might want to steer clear if they value their sleek physiques.
A new study finds that when the scale reads "obese" for one individual, the odds that their friends will become obese increase by more than 50 percent.
The study, published in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that obesity is "socially contagious," as it can spread among individuals in close social circles. The likely explanation: A person's idea of what is an appropriate body size is affected by the size of his or her friends.
-snip-
I am on a list where they are actually talking about this study and someone pointed out this sentence in the actual study:
"Mean effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals were calculated by simulating the first difference in the contemporaneous obesity of the alter (changing from 0 to 1) with the use of 1000 randomly drawn sets of estimates from the coefficient covariance matrix and with all other variables held at their mean values."
The person, who is a PhD and works for a medical school in the dept of nutrition looked at it and said that in plain English, they ran a whole lot of computer simulations and presented selected outputs. Any resemble to reality is purely coincidental.
What we have here is a data dredge where they grabbed a whole lot of studies, tossed out the ones that refuted the end results they wanted and are probably applying for lots of grants to keep studying the whole thing.
Study: Obesity is Socially Contagious
People who notice their friend packing on pounds might want to steer clear if they value their sleek physiques.
A new study finds that when the scale reads "obese" for one individual, the odds that their friends will become obese increase by more than 50 percent.
The study, published in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that obesity is "socially contagious," as it can spread among individuals in close social circles. The likely explanation: A person's idea of what is an appropriate body size is affected by the size of his or her friends.
-snip-
I am on a list where they are actually talking about this study and someone pointed out this sentence in the actual study:
"Mean effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals were calculated by simulating the first difference in the contemporaneous obesity of the alter (changing from 0 to 1) with the use of 1000 randomly drawn sets of estimates from the coefficient covariance matrix and with all other variables held at their mean values."
The person, who is a PhD and works for a medical school in the dept of nutrition looked at it and said that in plain English, they ran a whole lot of computer simulations and presented selected outputs. Any resemble to reality is purely coincidental.
What we have here is a data dredge where they grabbed a whole lot of studies, tossed out the ones that refuted the end results they wanted and are probably applying for lots of grants to keep studying the whole thing.
Comments
If the hypothesis were true, it could solve two of society's most irritating problems. All you'd have to do is gather up all those who are on perpetual diets and all those who are anorexic/bulemic and get them to live together. Somehow, all the lost/gained weight would even itself out and we'd end up in balance -- nothing really lost or gained, just moved around.