Are Your Facebook Friends Making You Fat?

(CC) Sean MacEntee/Flickr

With friends like these, who needs enemies? Columbia Business School and the University of Pittsburgh has conducted a study that will be published in the Journal of Consumer Research in June 2013 linking higher body mass index to Facebook.

“We found this in a variety of settings, ranging from healthy versus unhealthy food choices, to how long people persisted at a challenging task,” said study author Andrew T. Stephen, an assistant professor and Katz Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, to Mashable. “We also found broader evidence of this in two really important contexts where self-control matters a lot: health and personal finances.”

Self-esteem seems to be affected by your friends on Facebook, which can lead to less-than-desirable eating or spending habits. When we feel inferior to other people, it can have a negative impact on our choices. It’s easier to reach for a cookie or a bag of chips after you’ve read all about the cheerleader who was mean to you in high school taking a glamorous trip to Paris with her handsome husband and perfect children.

Stephen points out, “Note that we found these relationships after controlling for a number of demographic and socioeconomic factors that would also affect these things.” He continues, “What was really surprising to us was that in our studies these effects were found after just five minutes of browsing Facebook. It seems that people don’t need to spend a lot of time to be psychologically affected,” he said. “Being informed about these kinds of consequences, as surprising as they may be, can help us prevent ourselves from suffering them.”

Rather than seeing this as a case for avoiding Facebook, maybe this is simply a case of being careful when choosing your friends. Rather than having Facebook profiles with hundreds of “friends,” maybe it’s time we only share with those we truly consider our friends. People who lift us up and make us feel good about ourselves are the only ones we should be giving our attention to, anyway.

(By Marissa Brassfield for CalorieLab)

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Are Your Facebook Friends Making You Fat? is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/11/14/are-your-facebook-friends-making-you-fat/

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