The time has come to admit a dark and troubling secret: I am the most overweight of my friends. It’s true. I admit it. All my attempts at wearing untucked shirts and upsizing my pants can’t hide the pain in my heart. It’s me. I’m the obese one.

Of course, I didn’t realize that this secret was deep and troubling until recently when the scales were lifted from my eyes (so to speak) by what Richard Suzman, director of the National Institute on Aging’s Behavioral and Social Research Program, calls “one of the most exciting studies in medical sociology that I have seen in decades.”

What, you ask, did this study show? Well, according to the authors, obesity spreads through social networks. The article “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years” published in the July issue of the New England Journal of Medicine presents data collected from 12,067 participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a multi-decade government health-research project. In an interview with Newsweek, Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and coauthor of the study explained: “If your close friend becomes obese in a given time interval, there’s triple the risk that you will follow suit. Before you know it you have an obesity epidemic, where we’re all kind of gaining weight together, like a fashion spreading through society, rising in lockstep.”

So, it’s all my fault. Or, it will be. I mean, when my friends get fat, which they are three times more likely to do now because I’m overweight, right? Strangely, no data was reported regarding how likely overweight people were to lose weight if their friends were all (or even mostly) not overweight. Nor was there any consideration of total number of friends versus number of overweight friends. The authors suggest that friends losing weight should have a similar influence on weight loss, but no statistical model to support this is presented.

Which makes me wonder: If obesity in the population (and as a proportion of the research sample) has increased over time, then doesn’t that mean that the odds of having a fat friend gone up over that time? So, who are the skinny people in this study? People with no friends?

Hey! I’d rather be fat than friendless! Who wants to go out for a pizza?