How Friends Affect Your Health and Habits

Many will find that reducing unwholesome snacks or going to a gym is easier when friends and family make the same changes in their lives.

However, not all decisions that affect our health have been made consciously, since we copy the behavior of friends, colleagues, and relatives we identify and admire.

Sadly, we also imitate habits that are bad for our health, such as smoking or overindulgence.

This phenomenon means that nontransmittable conditions such as heart disease or stroke may seem to spread from person to person as an infection, Kosovo Press broadcasts.

The people we value and with whom we are in regular contact make up our social environment.

A study of the heart has studied the power of the social environment since the late 1940 ' s, following closely three generations of Fremingham's inhabitants, a city of Massachusetts.

This research has shown that a person is much more prone to overweight if someone in his or her environment is also overweight. She suggested that it be 57 percent more likely if he was a friend, 40 percent more likely if he was a brother or a sister, and 37 percent more likely if he was a husband.

The effect is more pronounced if two are of the same sex, and it has to do with how strong one person's feelings toward the other.

Fremingem's study, for example, revealed that a person's weight was not affected by the neighbor whom he or she met every day unless they had a close relationship.

In unbalanced friendships, the person who understood that friendship as important was more inclined to gain weight if his <x0-friend” made, but not vice versa.

The divorce rate, smoking and alcohol also seemed to spread to friends and family. These findings are important. Although we are affected by aging and may be prone to certain conditions, the risk of contracting the most common nontransmittable diseases increases significantly from certain types of behavior, such as smoking, eating, physical activity, and alcohol consumption.

These nontransmittable conditions, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and lung diseases, cause seven deaths in ten globally and almost 90 percent of all deaths in Great Britain.

Emotions are contagious

The social environment can also affect behavior and spirituality.

It may not surprise you, but teen smoking may be influenced by popularity. When popular teens smoke, smoking increases, and the number of people who abandon cigarettes decreases.

Likewise, youths whose friends are dissatisfied were more inclined to become unfair themselves and vice versa. These symptoms showed no clinical depression, which turned out not to spread that way.

But it is known that it affects the quality of a teenager's life and can sometimes lead to greater risks of clinical depression later in life.

The idea that emotions are contagious arises from the controversial secret experiment conducted on nearly 700,000 Facebook users.

The experiment selectively filtered what can be seen in a user's news source, which uses an algorithm to display relevant Facebook guest posts.

Two parallel experiments have been conducted: One reduces the exposure of users to posts expressing positive emotions, while the other lowers exposure to positions of negative emotion.

Users who faced positive posts were more likely to post positive posts themselves, and vice versa.

This suggests that emotions can spread through social networks on the Internet, despite a lack of personal interaction or body language signals.

A criticism directed at the expense of exploring our social environments is that we become friends with people who already have similar traits or we are in a similar situation.

But many studies are trying to explain this theory, known as social climbing.

The spread of traditional messages for a healthier life can increase health inequalities, as not everyone is able to accept the advice offered. It often works only for the healthiest, those in first place have a higher education, financial resources, and social support that allows them to change their lifestyle.

However, even those who are not aware of their health “are affected by the behavior of those with whom they are in regular contact and who care about them.

These influential individuals, who are related to their social and social environments, are more likely to share experiences with others, interact, and admire.

Further research into how human behavior is spreading can help the government and the National Health Service do much more to increase healthy behavior, reducing future suffering and death from uncommunicable diseases.

This analysis was conducted for the BBC by Oyinlola Ojebode, associate professor of the School of Medicine at Warwick University.