Dr. Nicholas Christakis, for his conclusions that obesity is contagious. He analyzed data from a study from one town (Framingham, Massachusetts), and found a correlation of friends becoming obese with other friends. "It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away - the influence remained." Conclusion: having fat friends makes you fat.
*smoldering rage*
*Slap!* *Slap!*
Hello! OBVIOUS cause-effect fallacy here. What makes people friends? Similar interests and attitudes. Similarities are further enhanced by growing up in the same town. The obesity correlation is FAR more likely to be caused by shared factors than by interpersonal influence. For hypothetical example: Joe didn't become fat because Bob did; Bob and Joe both became fat because they share a love of drawn butter and a hatred of jogging. The fact that physical separation does not affect the correlation supports my hypothesis FAR more than it supports Dr. Christakis's, and in fact should have eliminated (or at least greatly reduced attention to) the possibility of direct interpersonal influence. If your friend is hundreds of miles away, and your friendship is either not being maintained, or maintained by telephone, e-mail, and letters, you very well may not know that your friend has gained weight. If you don't, there's no way your friend's weight can affect you. But, the shared influences will remain.
I question Dr. Christakis' ability as a researcher that he did not consider (or dismissed) the more obvious and likely conclusion here in favor of the more discriminatory and fear-mongering one.
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Wow. Talk about failing at research, or at least at drawing conclusions from it. Fat as virus like (an idiotic way of putting it...eek, beware the fat bug!) fails to explain why there are friends who do not gain weight when their friends do. The shared interest hypothesis can go both ways, depending on which interests are shared.
ReplyDeleteDr. Dingbat also suggests the solution is to make friends with thin people, despite saying nothing in his conclusions about thinness being contageous. If he believed his conclusion, wouldn't the result of that be to make the thin people fat, not the other way around? So...does he believe his conclusion or not?
I vote we slap him either way.