Should we treat obesity like a contagious disease?

Q: In what way is obesity a “social contagion”?

D. T.: If you’re somebody who loves to go to the gym and loves to eat healthy, it’s unlikely that you’re going to draw in a circle of friends that love to smoke cigarettes and love to eat at fast food restaurants. You’re going to kind of surround yourself and emulate the behavior of a cluster around you. There is some experimental evidence for that.

D. A.: I want to just be clear that actually there is a hypothesis out there, supported by some data, that certain microbes—particularly adenoviruses—do contribute to obesity, and in that sense, it would be contagious in the more literal sense of spreading viruses from one person to another. So we don’t want to dismiss that.