文章基本信息

标题：Social Network Concordance in Food Choice Among Spouses, Friends, and Siblings
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作者：Mark A. Pachucki ; Paul F. Jacques ; Nicholas A. Christakis 等
期刊名称：American journal of public health
印刷版ISSN：0090-0036
出版年度：2004
卷号：101
期号：11
页码：2170-2177
DOI：10.2105/AJPH.2011.300282
语种：English
出版社：American Public Health Association
摘要：Objectives. We investigated whether eating behaviors were concordant among diverse sets of social ties. Methods. We analyzed the socioeconomic and demographic distribution of eating among 3418 members of the Framingham Heart Study observed from 1991 to 2001. We used a data-classification procedure to simplify choices into 7 nonoverlapping patterns that we matched with information on social network ties. We used correlation analysis to examine eating associations among 4 types of peers (spouses, friends, brothers, and sisters). Longitudinal multiple logistic regression was used to evaluate evidence for peer influences on eating. Results. Of all peer types, spouses showed the strongest concordances in eating patterns over time after adjustment for social contextual factors. Across all peers, the eating pattern most likely to be shared by socially connected individuals was “alcohol and snacks.” Models estimating one's current eating pattern on the basis of a peer's prior eating provided supportive evidence of a social influence process. Conclusions. Certain eating patterns appeared to be socially transmissible across different kinds of relationships. These findings represent an important step in specifying the relevant social environment in the study of health behaviors to include eating. Food consumption is incontrovertibly linked with public health outcomes ranging from obesity to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.^{1 , 2} Research has found that eating with others affects what an individual consumes³ and, more recently, that obesity status is influenced by ties in social networks.⁴ Together, this knowledge highlights the value of understanding the roles that relationships play in our eating behaviors. To date, however, there has been little research investigating the relationship between patterns of food consumption and the complex patterns of human connectedness. To what degree is the eating behavior of one's peers associated with what one eats? Research on commensality and health concordance gives some insight into this question. For instance, eating with others is associated with greater ingestion than when food is consumed alone⁵; friends and family members are associated with greater “social facilitation” than are other kinds of relationships, including co-workers, classmates, lovers, or roommates³; family members are more likely to eat together than friends are⁶; and cognitive dietary restraint, disinhibition, and susceptibility to hunger have a significant familial resemblance.⁷ Research on diet in the context of health concordance has found that newly coupled individuals tend to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables, low-fat foods, and breakfasts together, while consuming less take-out food,⁸ and that spouses’ nutrient consumption is modestly correlated.⁹ Couples shape one another's choices, although female partners tend to have more influence over male choices.¹⁰ However, a great deal of what we know of commensality has been gleaned from laboratory research rather than real-world studies of eating behavior, thereby excluding the social environment. Similarly, our knowledge of diet concordance in observational studies has largely issued from small-scale, cross-sectional designs.¹¹ Previous work on social networks and health has found that weight status is related to patterns of social relations^{4 , 12} and that drinking behaviors can spread in a social network.¹³ However, whether food consumption per se is subject to similar forms of peer influence in a network setting has not been examined. Our objective was to investigate whether connections with particular kinds of intimate relations (spouses, friends, and siblings) were predictive of eating patterns of connected individuals in a large prospective cohort study over time. To address this question, food patterns were first enumerated from food-frequency questionnaires. We then performed a series of correlation analyses to assess food pattern concordance, and we fit a series of longitudinal multiple logistic regression models to test for peer influence on eating among close social contacts.