Been meaning to get to this for a while; the video above was released by the TED organization in May. It is of Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, speaking about the value of connection and social networks — the actual kind, as opposed to merely the virtual kind.

What caught my interest is the first example of his research, obesity. He says his research showed that if your friends are obese, your chance of being obese is 45 percent higher.

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If your friends' friends are obese — people you may not even know — your chance of being obese is 25 percent higher. If your friends' friends' friends are obese, you still have a 10 percent higher chance. It's not until the fourth degree of separation, he says, that the effect wanes.

Though I have definitely experienced some of what he described — if you've ever had an eating buddy, you know that you're more likely to eat, and overeat when you're together, as if you give each other license. Often, overeating may be the reason you two are getting together, just as I used to have friends with whom I cooked and smoked crack; I never hung out with them otherwise.

Another part of the phenomenon, Christakis said, is that your friend's size may alter your sense of social norm; if he's fat, it becomes more acceptable in my thinking to be fat.

I can't share some great insight that I experienced as the result of his descriptions, but I found them interesting enough to spend this time passing them on to you. Does any of it ring true, in your experience?