Secondhand Fat

A.J. Leibling, a vastly overweight journalist of the first half of the last century, used to say, perhaps in defense of his own avoirdupois, that in his youth a diplomat who weighed fewer than 250 pounds was considered untrustworthy. Shakespeare, recall, made Cassius "lean and hungry," implying, perhaps, that the want of food turned his mind to violent machinations. The painter Renoir liked his women zaftig, or plumply curvaceous. Were the women of his paintings alive today, half of them, such is the mania for slenderness, might now be practicing bulimics. Fashions in heft, like those in hems and heels and hairdos, change over time.

When I was a kid, a section of clothes in department stores was set aside for "Boys Husky." In the men's department, there was a rack for those known as "Portly," which meant they carried around an "alderman," or fairly extensive front footage. "Heavyset" was another word then much in use. Heavyset was not necessarily a bad thing to be; it suggested substantiality. To be husky, portly, heavyset implied no moral judgment. It was the way one happened to be shaped.

But no longer is weightiness acceptable. Only in the National Football League is the 300-pound interior lineman valued. Only on the National Basketball Association team is a "widebody" such as Charles Barkley or Shaquille O'Neal (two notably full-figured young men) made welcome. Everywhere else fat is not, distinctly, where it's at.

Serious heft is just now right up there with smoking among the deadly sins. The attack on the two evils has not been altogether dissimilar. In both instances, the modus operandi has been to publicize, then demonize; make being overweight, like smoking, seem a moral choice -- or, rather, an immoral one, not just bad for you but bad for everyone around you.

I once wrote, jokingly, about the baleful effects of secondary cholesterol. The joke was that, just as it is not healthy to be around smokers, so is it unhealthy to be around people eating red meat, eggs and ice cream, lest their intake of such high cholesterol food badly affect your own health.

A new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and done at Harvard Medical School (those twin towers of false authority), claims that not only do fat people do great harm to themselves but, through the influence of social network, can harm friends, especially close friends, by making it easier for them to overeat. Not only food, it turns out, but the wrong friends can make you fat.

I have been using the words "overweight" and "heavy" and "fat." But obese, the approved official word, is so much more dampening to the spirit. Such an ugly word, obese -- it sounds, does it not, so close to "Oh, beast!"

Definitions of obesity vary. In some quarters one is obese if one is overweight by 30% of one's ideal body weight. In others, it is defined as "above-normal body weigh, usually defined as more than 20% above what's considered healthy for people of a certain age, height and bone structure." And then, to get into the scientifically opaque, according to the National Institutes of Health, "a person is considered obese if he or she has a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m2 or greater." You taking notes on this, Fatso?

The gravamen of the Harvard study holds that, if you hang around the heavy, soon heavy indeed will be the added bulk hanging about you, in the form of double and triple chins, pot bellies, love handles, ample cabooses, thunder thighs, thick calves, chubby fingers . . . good God, it's enough to make one tape a photograph of Joan Didion in a body stocking in one's locker down at the gym.

The Harvard study, a work of medical sociology, is based on the famous Framingham, Mass., federal study of heart disease, which has been tracking some 12,067 people over the 32-year period between 1971-2003.

Like much sociology, what the study has to report is obvious: If lots of one's friends are fat, it naturally makes it more likely that one will pick up their eating habits. In such company, putting on an extra 30 or 40 pounds isn't going to result in social censure.

Like much sociology, too, the Harvard study is also preposterous: It apparently allows for environment (lots of junk food out there) and genetics (some people can eat Seattle Sutton meals with the tread mill turned all the way up without loss of a gram), but its single new finding -- that fat friends make it easier for their friends in turn to become fat -- dominates and is the only reason for the study's temporary prominence. In one of his poems, Wallace Stevens speaks of the "lunatics of one idea," and this particular idea -- fat friends make you fat -- sounds like a nice instance of Stevens's fine phrase.

Experience suggests that before long the New England Journal will publish another article setting the Harvard Study on its duff: A Stanford study, say, or one from Penn State, that discovers the extraordinarily high rate per capita of Dairy Queens in Framingham, Mass., and its suburbs, thus wiping out the Harvard Study quicker than Harvey Weinstein might wipe out a box of Godiva chocolates.

But apparently, the cruel prospect of breaking with already obese friends is not what the Harvard researchers have in mind. One of them, Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, goes out of his way in a New York Times report of the study, to say so. What, then, as the boys at the think tanks like to say, are the implications here for social policy? None jump to mind, or even limp off the couch.

Without the aid of any studies and no statistics whatsoever, I should have thought that much obesity is a social-class phenomenon. Politically incorrect as it is to suggest this, many of the poor or lower-middle classes seem overweight, especially in urban settings, where junk food is readily available, relatively cheap and requires no work to prepare. There also seems to be much obesity among those living in rural areas, where the whiplash of fashion does not crack.

The rest of the nation -- we so-called educated classes, striving to be starved-to-perfection thin, terrified of eating any food that hinders our ability to live just beyond forever -- eats hesitantly, anxiously. But at least, so far as can be known, we eat relatively healthily. Pass the arugula.

Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of "Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide" (Eminent Lives, 2006).