We all know that viral and bacterial diseases are contagious, but we had never thought that ills such as obesity or any drug addiction are so recently.Recently, a study has shown that we could consider contagious obesity.
Is obesity contagious?
According to the aforementioned study, living in a social nucleus with a higher level of obesity puts us at greater risk of increasing our body mass index (BMI) ), almost as if we were "catching" behaviors that make us fat.
The work to know if it is contagious obesity was done in people living in military bases of the States United.Data were used for 1,111 children and more than 1,300 parents who had been assigned to one of the 12 US military bases.

The incidence of obesity varied among the counties where the bases were located, from 21 percent in El Paso County, Colorado, to 38 percent in Vernon County, Louisiana.
Measurements of the body mass index of parents and children revealed that approximately one quarter of adolescents and three quarters of adults could be classified as overweight or obese.
Once adjustments were made to have taking into account the effects of factors such as age, income and even rank, it was discovered that the children of a military family whose parents could be classified as obese were more likely to be obese too.
Social relations make obesity contagious
As we have seen, this study only confirms what has already been noted on other occasions.It is possible that the findings of this work are not a big surprise, but they provide much-needed evidence for the hypothesis that our social ties play an important role in the way we develop healthy and unhealthy habits and as other studies already said we can affirm that our relationships with family, friends and even coworkers can make obesity contagious.

After comparing the results of this study with previous work, the researchers they concluded that when a person gains weight, he drags his friends and family in the same direction and that this social factor can be even more important than genetics.
It is very interesting to know what it is between friends when the bigger influence to gain weight.He revealed it like this: when someone becomes obese, their friends have a 57% chance of doing the same, especially if they are very close.The influence in relation to family members is also high (40%), but certainly very away from the first place on the podium.
What do you think of this data that concludes that we could consider contagious obesity?
If you want to know more about this topic, some statistics on obesity that you must know
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