Your Social Circle Can Make or Break Your Dieting Habits

There is strength in numbers when it comes to getting the support you need from those closest to you, like family and friends, and it's especially important to your diet and overall health.

We previously blogged about how children are more likely to eat more when dining with friends who consume more calories, based on a study of teens and tweens published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. In the same vein, there is further research that shows obesity can be contagious.

In a 2007 study spanning 32 years of a social network of 12,000 adults conducted by Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis and fellow colleagues, it was found that a person is 37 percent more likely to be obese if a spouse is, 40 percent more likely if a sibling is and 57 percent more likely if a friend is.

The reasoning behind these facts is that adults eat more in the presence of family and friends than with strangers, and that socializing with overweight individuals can affect their perceptions of what the norm is regarding eating habits.

Finally, there's the idea that we just like to hang with people that are like ourselves. Cornell food sociologist Jeffrey Sobal explains that "especially among two overweight people, there's a sort of permission-giving going on. We're encouraging each other to eat more."

Wanting to be proactive about losing weight doesn't mean dropping overweight friends because making the decision to eat healthier can just as easily influence those around you to do the same.

--TIME

Can Peers Push Kids to Eat More?

Peer pressure can be a powerful force, but does that also influence eating habits? A childhood obesity study recently found that friends can influence the amount of food you eat, and that includes overeating.

23 overweight and 42 normal weight children between the ages of 9 and 15 were involved in the study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition were paired in groups of familiar and unfamiliar children. Each pair sat in a room for 45 minutes with bowls of low-calorie snacks such as baby carrots and grapes and high-calorie snacks such as potato chips and cookies. The children were told to eat as many snacks as they wanted from their own bowls.

The friends who ate together were found to eat more than pairs who didn't know each other. Friends were also found to eat similar amounts of food compared with the participants who ate with a stranger. When overweight children were paired with other overweight children, whether they knew the other person or not, ate more than the overweight children who ate with a normal weight child.

Sarah Salvy, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Division of Behavioral Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences told the ScienceDaily that "both overweight and normal weight participants eating with a friend ate significantly more than did participants eating in the presence of an unfamiliar peer. These results are consistent with research in adults, which showed that eating among friends and family is distinctly different than eating among strangers." --ScienceDaily