http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/health/26fat.html?scp=7&sq=social+network&st=nyt Last summer, an article entitled “Find Yourself Packing It On? Blame Friends” appeared in the New York Times. The story details a study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that when a person gains weight, their close friends also tend to gain weight. The study followed a group of participants from 1973 to 2003, tracking weight gain and social connections in a sample from a small town. The online link to the article also includes a video component, showing the growth of the network over time. It is evident from this video that individual’s nodes turn to green (the color denoted for those who are technically obese) shortly after the nodes that they share edges with turn green.  The study found that friends are more likely than neighbors or relatives to mimic the weight gain of individuals. The article reports that, when one close mutual friend became obese, “the other had a 117 percent increased chance of becoming obese, too.” This would seem to make sense if one considers the conditions under which people gain weight. Most people do not dramatically gain weight overnight, but rather as a function of their day-to-day activities and lifestyles. Thus, it would make sense that friends, the people who we choose to spend our time with, would have a larger influence on these day to day activities than neighbors and family members, who we see only on occasion. For instance, though we may eat a particularly large thanksgiving dinner with our relatives, or join our neighbors for an occasional walk around the neighborhood, it is our friends who we share meals with day in or day out or engage with in regular exercise. Because of these habits, it would make sense to qualify our friends as “strong ties,” and our neighbors and relatives as “weak ties,” because of the involvement these different groups of people have in our food and exercise routines. It makes sense, then, that our friends’ weight gain, compared to that of other groups, has the largest effect on our own weight gain.  The New York Times article infers that the study may suggest that the “obesity epidemic” is a result of a few people beginning to gain weight from something in the environment. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that epidemics and messages spread through a network because of “connectors,” people that, for whatever reason maintain more social ties than other people and function as links that bring people together. It is interesting to consider what type of people might be deemed connectors in the spread of an epidemic such as obesity. It seems that people who are highly respected in their social networks might serve this function. The Times article suggests that when one person gains weight, people’s ideas of body image shift and they think it is acceptable to gain weight, also. It makes sense that people who are highly respected and emulated in other weighs would have more of an effect on people’s shifting images of obesity. Specifically, if people who take care of their bodies in all other ways start to gain weight, others may see this as the norm and begin to gain weight as well. Though it sounds superficial, if a person looks pleasing in all other ways, their weight gain may not be noticeable, and this may encourage people to emulate their appearance, even if it means that they begin to gain weight themselves.