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Food and Health Fact #71
Fact #71: Work colleagues and food choices
By Matthew Rees
Food and Health Fact #71: Work colleagues and food choices
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Who you eat with strongly influences what you eat. That’s the conclusion of a study published last week in Nature, which was based on analyzing approximately 6,000 employees of Massachusetts General Hospital and the food they purchased in the hospital’s cafeterias over a two-year period. (The study captured three million encounters involving employees making cafeteria purchases together.) “We found that individuals tend to mirror the food choices of others in their social circles, which may explain one way obesity spreads through social networks,” said Douglas Levy, an author of the study and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “The effect size was a bit stronger for healthy foods than for unhealthy foods.” The nutritional quality of the food and beverages purchased was based on the cafeterias’ use of a “traffic light” labeling system – green for healthy, yellow for less healthy, and red for unhealthy. (The study did not explore why cafeterias in a hospital would be selling unhealthy products.)
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