Framingham Heart Study Essay

People are connected, and so their health is connected. A woman named Eileen Belloli kept track of her friends. She kept documentation of all her friends as they got older and they were all still in good health. There was only one guy who had changed health wise, but he did not remain friends. Eileen Belloli and her husband were a part of the Framingham Heart Study. This study had been underway for more than 50 years and had followed more than 15,000 people. In 2007, two scientists by the names of, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler used the research from the study to make a brand new discovery. They found a basis for the theory that good behaviors pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses; the same goes with bad …show more content…
Christakis made a name for himself by studying the “widowhood effect” – an inclination of spouses to die soon after their partners’ deaths. Christakis and Fowler had results of how 5,124 subjects were connected, tracing a web of 53,228 ties between friends, family, and coworkers. Once they got all the results together they saw how the people who were getting fat were grouped together. When a Framingham resident became overweight, his or her friends were fifty-seven percent more likely to become overweight as well. It even showed you could become overweight from a friend of a friend; this was known as skipping links. They found that a behavior was able to skip links was the strangest thing they found. The two scientists have no idea how jumping links works but they theorize that people could be able to pass along a social signal without acting on it. Their hypothesis was “that people’s behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior.” From history people thought that having a small tight group of friends was essential to being