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Who hasn’t enjoyed the guilty pleasure of sharing an outrageously rich and caloric dessert with a best friend and indulging with abandon? If you have, you better not make a habit of it. A new report published on July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine seems to suggest that obesity can spread among friends like a virus...

The research team, funded by the National Institute of Aging, looked at the connections among the more than 12000 people who were enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study for over three decades. They found that if a person had a friend who became obese, their chance of becoming obese increased 57 percent. Among mutual friends, the risk increased a whopping 171 percent. The effect was even larger among people of the same sex. Food for thought: If your best female friend is fat, you’re at extreme risk of becoming her mirror image.

“It’s not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with,” said Nicholas Christakis, a physician and a professor at Harvard Medical School in a press release. “Rather, there is a direct causal relationship.”

This research doesn’t mean that friendship is bad for your health. The other side of the coin: The researchers remind us that thinness is also contagious.