Obesity as a Social Disease? How Friendship Could Be Fattening
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SCIENCE IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I'm Barbara Klein.
And I'm Steve Ember. This week, we will tell how friendship
could be fattening. We also will tell about allergic reactions
and their treatments. And, we report on a computer program that
has solved a popular game. Researchers say they have found that
fatness can spread from person to person in social groups. When
one person gains weight, close friends often gain weight, too.
The study was published last month in the New England Journal of
Medicine. The researchers looked at records from the Framingham
Heart Study. It gathered health information about more than
twelve thousand people from nineteen seventy-one to two thousand
three. The information was very detailed. It listed changes in
the body-mass index for each individual. The body mass index
measures a person's body fat. The Framingham study also provided
information abou