回答{TSE}题： Find Yourself Packing It On？Blame Friends Obesity can spread from person to p
erson, much like a virus,researchers are reporting today.When one person gains weight, close friendstend to gain weight, too. Their study,published in The New England Journal ofMedicine,involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067people who had been closely followed for 32 years,from 1971 to 2003. The investigators knew who was friends with whom as well as whowas a spouse or sibling or neighbor,and they knew how much each person weighedat various times over three decades. That let them reconstruct what happenedover the years as individuals became obese. Did their friends also he comeobese？ Did family members？ Or neighbors？ The answer, the researchers report, was that people were mostlikely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person'schances of becoming obese by 57 percent. There was no effect when a neighborgained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends. It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of milesaway, the influence remaineD．And the greatest influence of all was betweenclose mutual friends. There, if one became obese,the other had a 171 percentincreased chance of becoming obese, too. The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, theinvestigators say. But since most people were gaining,not losing,over the 32years,the result was,on average,that people grew fatter. Dr. Nicholas A．Christakis, a physician and professor of medicalsociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the newstudy,said one explanation was that friends affected each others' perception offatness. When a close friend becomes obese,obesity may not look so bad. "You change your idea of what is an acceptable body typeby looking at the people around you,"Dr. Christakis said. The investigators say their findings can help explain whyAmericans have become fatter in recent years-each person who became obese waslikely to drag along some friends. Their analysis was unique, Dr. Christakis said, because itmoved beyond a simple analysis of one person and his or her social contacts andinstead examined an entire social network at once,looking at how a person'sfriend's friends,or a spouse's sibling's friends,could have an influence on aperson's weight. The effects,he said,"highlight the importance of a spreadingprocess,a kind of social contagion,that spreads through the network. " Of course,the investigators say, social networks are not theonly factors that affect body weight. There is a strong genetic component at work,too. Science has shown that individuals have genetically determinedranges of weights, spanning perhaps 80 or so pounds for each person. But thatleaves a large role for the environment in determining whether a person'sweight is near the top of his or her range or near the bottom. As people havegotten fatter,it appears that many are edging toward9 the top of their ranges.The question has been why. If the new research is correct,it may say that something in theenvironment seeded what some call an obesity epidemic,making a few people gainweight. Then social networks let the obesity spread rapidly. {TS}Who had the greatest influence on people who became obese'
A. Their friends.
B. Their neighbours.
C. "Their family members.
D. Their colleagues.
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