Oh Shit! It's Mr. Creosote! Blame his friends.

This week's New England Journal of Medicine published a three decade-long study that finds one's social network of friends can have as much of an impact on one's weight gain as personal choice and individual restraint.

Conclusion: Dump your fatty friends. They're bad for your health.

Really, there's a lot to like in this study and may contribute to the dialogue in finding new and inventive ways to get people to put the fork down.

Everyone knows this, or at least sees ample (no pun intended) evidence to this fact.

As a waiter, the glut (pun intended) of evidence is intensified, as I see a sizable (I have more...) portion of the population on a nightly basis making food choices based on their's and their friend's impulses.

And as a former fatty, I understand, down to the excruciating minutiae, why one balloons up to maximum capacity. Food is good. Food is just reeaaalllly good.

But this study should probably be seen as an attachment to the greater scope and literature on understanding social networks in general. How friendships are formed and maintained; how friends can directly influence the behavior of each other; how seemingly innocuous daily choices made within a group framework has indirect, long-term consequences, both physically and psychologically. "My group of friends really love Chili's deep-fried Southwest sampler."

More to the point, the excess fat, in many cases, is merely a by-product of people hanging around other people similar to themselves; how identities within the group are formed and a pecking order created; how decisions with many are never individual, but something to be followed. "She's ordering dessert, why can't I?"

Most to the point, nothing happens in a vacuum. Individual choices are never entirely individual, but a personal outgrowth of our experience with the immediate world around us. Our friends/people around us have much more influence over that than broader concepts like 'societal norms' or 'cultural influences'.

In short, w/r/t the study, Well...No Shit friends have influence. This information is new?

Given this study, can someone sue their friends if they have a heart attack? Fit that into the cause célèbre of fixing health care.

Really, where was all this passion in '93 when the Democrats were actively trying to fix this ridiculousness?