Word: weights
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Wondering why your waistline is expanding? Have a look at those of your friends. Your close friends can influence your weight even more than genes or your family members, according to new research appearing in the July 26 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. The study's authors suggest that obesity isn't just spreading; rather, it may be contagious between people, like a common cold...
...author Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School considered the possibility - and were surprised. For one thing, geographic distance between friends in the study seemed to have no impact: friends who lived a 5-hour drive apart and saw each other infrequently were just as influenced by each other's weight gains as those who lived close enough to share weekly take-out meals or pick-up basketball games. The best proof that friendship caused the weight gain, says Fowler, is that people were much more likely to pattern their own behavior on the actions of people they considered friends...
...obvious question is, Why? Spouses share meals and a backyard, but the researchers found a much smaller risk of gaining weight - a 37% increase - when one spouse became obese. Siblings share genes, but their influence, too, was much smaller, increasing each other's risk 40%. Fowler believes the effect has much more to do with social norms: whom we look to when considering appropriate social behavior. Having fat friends makes being fat seem more acceptable. "Your spouse may not be the person you look to when you're deciding what kind of body image is appropriate, how much...
Alternatively, obese boys were immune to what Crosnoe terms the "college effect" and were just as likely as normal-weight students to go to college. Crosnoe thinks the difference has to do with the fact that body and appearance are more central to girls' self-concept than to boys', and that the negative social effects of obesity have a more powerful impact on girls' lives, including their academic careers...
...that this First Amendment challenge regarding the rights of witnesses has originated in a sexual-assault case. Sex crimes, due in part to their intensely personal nature, tap into a complicated set of cultural values and historical meaning; thus, a ban on sex-crime-related words carries a different weight from one on words like "murder" or "embezzlement." Michelle Anderson, an expert in sexual violence and the law, and the dean of the City University of New York Law School, notes that rulings like Cheuvront's reflect the way that the courts have traditionally viewed rape cases. "The notion that...