http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...649321,00.html
"Some friends cause hypertension, some cause inebriation and some, it is now confirmed, cause obesity. Or the opposite. The study concludes that skinny people, likewise, tend to make their friends skinny. In high school, you could have chosen a friend with a six-pack of abs. Instead, you chose a friend with a six-pack of Coors. And that, as Frost wrote, has made all the difference.
Fat became fate. We've seen it with our own eyes. Larry Bird made everyone around him better; Elvis made everyone around him fatter, to judge by photographs of the Memphis Mafia--entourage members expanding and contracting like a bellows in time with their boss.
The co-author of the study, Dr. Nicholas Christakis of the Harvard Medical School, claims the obesity contagion is not merely a matter of like-minded people befriending one another. "It's not that obese or nonobese people simply find other similar people to hang out with."