The Washington Post has posted a provocative animated graphic that shows a social network with the nodes mapped to obesity. The narrated animation shows the clustering of the obese and the non-obese over time.

The animation comes from the New England Journal of Medicine, but the WaPo’s brief explanation of it seems to take a leap. They say it “demonstrates how social networks influence weight gain.” Well, the animation could just as easily be demonstrating that people cluster according to body mass index, but I haven’t read the NEJM article. [Tags: obesity social_networks washington_post nejm]

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