Great news! It isn't those late night snacks and lack of exercise that are making you fat. It's those disgusting fat people you hang out with.
And I can prove it...
According to Nicole Martin at Telegraph.co.uk,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/25/nfat125.xml
"People with obese friends or siblings are at a greater risk of becoming overweight, according to a new research [sic] which shatters the view that poor diets and sedentary lifestyles are uniquely to blame for rising obesitiy rates"
Hang onto those potato chips. Don't throw away the dip. Restock your fridge with beer and resume the couch potato position. All you gotta do is get rid of those fat friends.
First it was secondhand smoke, now it's second hand obesity. Let's put this in context. We all know that obesity kills--deaths caused by obesity are surpassing those from smoking, now we find out that obesity is contagious--you get it from your fat friends. Therefore, your fat friends are killing you.
There goes the image of jolly fat people. They are killers.
It's time to trim the fat. Get rid of your fat friends.
If YOU are a fattie, you are very likely to find yourself on the social chopping block. Even before your friends desert you, you should sever the ties yourself before you kill anyone else. That's what you get for being a fattie. You're a carrier. You're infected.
Within a few years, it will probably be illegal for fat people to have friends...friendship with the intent to kill...our prisons will be overflowing.
Here's a link to the actual study:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/357/4/370.pdf
Before we begin a jihad on fat people (or, depending on your size, get your lardass jihadded), I should address a minor stats issue. This study reports a longitudinal logistic regression analysis. Sounds impressive, but the whole study falls apart on that single point. Logistic regression is used to predict a discrete outcome (in this case, whether or not someone will become obese) from a set of predictor variables (in this case, the presence or absence of obese friends and relatives). It basically tells us how well those variables predict membership in a particular group--PREDICT, not CAUSE.
For those of you who are not statisticians, let's say that you were a insurance company and you wanted to decide whether someone is an accident risk or not. You could analyze past data using logistic regression. You could look at variables such as gender, race, age, color and make of car, smoker or not, presence or absence of tattoos....etc.
Your logistic regression results may tell you that a heavily tattooed, 20 year-old white male smoker, who drives a red sports car is a lousy insurance risk--and you are probably right. But, do any of those variables actually cause accidents? Do tattoos cause accidents? Do red cars cause accidents? Does smoking cause accidents? Unlikely. A much more reasonable approach would be to look for a something that underlies all of those variables...a tendency to take risks etc.
Logistic regression cannot be used to establish causality. You'd have to conduct a series of experiments to find out if any of those factors causes accidents.
Back to our jihad on fatties, isn't it much more reasonable to look for something that underlies the way fat spreads? People tend to form friendships with people of similar backgrounds and socioeconomic status. Both of these have been shown to correlate very highly with attitudes toward diets and exercise. There are any number of possible underlying variables that could explain the seeming contagiousness of fat; however, the discussion section of the study pussyfoots over this issue and leaves us with the bizzare impression that you can catch fat from your friends.
Properly conducted medical research makes it pretty clear that you don't catch fat, you do it to yourself by eating and not exercising. The human body wasn't designed to handle 2-liter Pepsis, pizza, six-packs of beer, and sitting in front of the tube for four and a half hours a day. Jeez!
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