Remember the “study” showing that having a fat friend made you more likely to be fat? Some researchers decided to apply the same methodology to pimples, height, and headaches. I missed this over the holidays but Sandy at JunkFoodScience didn’t. She summarized their results (published in the British Medical Journal) as follows:
They found increased relative risks of 58% for height, 62% for pimples, and 47% for headaches associated with the social network effect. These are similar, they said, to the 57% increased relative risk for obesity when a friend is obese and the 36% increased relative risk in quitting smoking when a friend quits that had been reported by Christakis and Fowler in their published social networking studies.
So, there you have it! If I drop all my friends who have acne, mine should clear right up, right?
Living ~400lbs 
Leave a Reply