by Hannah Joy on April 23, 2021 at 11:25 PM
Your colleagues influence the food you eat, be it healthy or unhealthy, especially when you sit together to eat, reveals a new study. We found that individuals tend to mirror the food choices of others in their social circles, which may explain one way obesity spreads through social networks, says Douglas Levy, PhD, an investigator at the Mongan Institute Health Policy Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and first author of new research published in
Nature Human Behaviour.
Levy and his co-investigators discovered that individuals eating patterns can be shaped even by casual acquaintances, evidence that corroborates several multi-decade observational studies showing the influence of people s social ties on weight gain, alcohol consumption and eating behavior.