You’re eating lunch in the high school cafeteria with your best friend. You watch as she cuts a few tiny pieces from her sandwich. Then, over the next 20 minutes, she eats just a few of those pieces, chewing very slowly. Much of the time she doesn’t eat at all. “If you eat your food really slowly and cut it up like this, you can stay really skinny,” she tells you.
Your first reaction might be: She must be really hungry! But, you have to admit, you do like the idea of being skinny. And if you watch your friend eat this way day after day, you might start doing it, too.
Because unhealthy habits can actually be contagious among teenagers.
In the scenario described above, “catching” the unhealthy behavior could be very bad, because your friend might have an eating disorder. And then you could get one, too! A number of studies have shown that all sorts of unhealthy habits and risk-taking — eating disorders, smoking, rudeness, delinquent behavior — can actually move through a group of friends like a virus. Even obesity, experts have found, can be “contagious.”
And you can “catch” a behavior from a friend or group of friends without being aware of it at all.
We Do Like Our Friends Do
One study of U.S. high school students found that behaviors associated with eating disorders — bingeing, fasting, diet pill use and excessive exercise — were clustered in certain communities, particularly among high school girls.
Another group of researchers found that you can “catch” obesity from a friend. They reported that if a friend is obese, their acquaintances have a 57 percent greater chance of becoming obese themselves. And “catching” obesity, they wrote, happens a lot more among friends than among family. The following year, the same research group found that smoking can be “contagious,” too. Of course, you can’t really “catch” a behavior like you catch a cold. But the experts think that we end up mirroring our friends’ behaviors because we like them, and therefore look to them to figure out what’s acceptable behavior. The trouble is, their behaviors might not be so good to copy!
Silver Lining
The good news is that just as unhealthy behaviors can be contagious, so can healthy behaviors. Sure, you can “catch” smoking; but you can also catch the behavior to stop smoking. You can “catch” losing weight in a healthy way (as opposed to catching an eating disorder). You can catch the exercise “bug”!
You can even “catch” happiness. The researchers who report that obesity and smoking can be contagious say that happiness is, too. They found that if you have a friend who’s happy, your chances of being happy go up 25 percent. Not bad!
If you’re worried about catching an unhealthy behavior, it might help to simply be aware that it can happen. So, if you see a friend taking ridiculously tiny bites of her food, remember: You don’t have to “catch” that kind of behavior if you don’t want to!
Read more about relationships at BodiMojo, from the ugly face of clichés to safe social networking.
This article was reviewed by Tara Cousineau, Ph.D.
