Perhaps You Hear this Often, but still, Is She Fatter or Am I Fatter?

The matter with the question is that people often compare themselves, in this case their body sizes, with those of other people. This objective of this blog post is to relate mental health, specifically mentality, with epdiet habits.

Nicholas Christakis, a professor, physician, and sociologist at the prestigious Harvard University, stress just how strongly societal factors mentally shape our perception of body image, and emotionally build and influence us to be personally either content, or dissatisfied with our physique. People around us will constantly change the height of the bar, causing the standards of how a healthy, acceptable body image should be, to fluctuate. Christakis says, "What's spreading from person to person is not a behaviour, but rather a norm. An idea is spreading."

Statistics from Christakis' research to exemplify how scary environmental factors can be:
1) If your friend's are obese, your risk of obesity is 45% higher.
2) If your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25% higher.
3) If your friend's friend's friends are obese, someone you probably don't know (yet), your risk of obesity is 10% higher.
4) Only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends, that you cannot blame someone else for your body size.
5) Most importantly, whether your friends know each other has not just to do with their body size and genes, but also with yours.

The obesity epidemic, as the University of Laval, and other universities and research centres around the world have so far analysed as "...a complex disease resulting from the interactions of a wide variety of hereditary and environmental factors." We also learned at a 2007 CBC Newsworld interview with Doctor Glenn Berrall, head of the pediatric nutrition clinic at North York General Hospital in Toronto, "Poor diet, lack of exercise and genetics all contribute to the problem. We seem to be living in an environment that fosters excess weight." Here again, its supported that environmental factors outweigh genetic factors that lead to obesity.