The prediction of a team of researchers from Harvard University in contradiction with other experts who say that the obesity rate in the nation reached a peak of 34 percent of the population of the United States.
The facts are the same group, led by Nicholas Christakis, who reported in 2007 that if someone's friend becomes obese person is likely to become obese increase by more than half.
Now that this is driving the obesity epidemic that progresses slowly but surely for the next 40 years. Alison Hill, a graduate student at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology, said the study is based on the idea that obesity can spread like an infectious disease and people can make their friends.
For the study, she and her colleagues used a mathematical model to four decades of data from a long-term study of the Framingham study health and habits of nearly an entire town in Massachusetts.
"We analyzed the likelihood of being obese and has been influenced by, Hill said in a telephone interview.
"We found that there is a baseline risk of obesity on the basis of which friends have, "said Hill.
Hill said that according to his calculations and study the influence of social interactions of obesity in the Framingham study, who think that U.S. obesity rate above 42 percent of the population.
During the lengthy investigation, the rate of weight gain caused by social interaction - contact with a person with friends who are overweight - has increased sharply since 1971, said Hill.
A "It seems more and more obesity is contagious," says Hill. The results are reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Computational Biology.
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