How friends influence your health
Having a good social network of family and friends can motivate people to live healthier, happier lives. In this video, HealthMaker James Fowler, PhD, professor of medical genetics and political science at UCSD, explains why.
Transcript
Clearly, the research shows that you shouldn't get rid of unhealthy friends. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Now, I'm not going to say that networks are the only thing. You definitely have to do other positive things. You have to educate people.
You have to make the incentives right. You have to also try to get people to help each other.
I think once we start integrating that information using friends as data to make better predictions about who's at risk, and also,
use friends as motivators to try to help people to make these positive changes, then we're really going to see the next revolution in personalized medicine.
And these are early days. I think that these are good first examples. But I think it's going to get even better because what
we have found in interventions like our voting setting interventions is that you can get multipliers of 4 to 5 to 1 if you actually do the intervention right
because that's really how much one person's behavior can change and spread and ripple through the network and affect other people. Clearly, the research shows that you shouldn't get rid
of unhealthy friends. When you're choosing new friends, I think what the research says is that if you choose
healthy friends, that you're more likely to be healthy yourself. I think we're going to see a revolution in this decade, in terms of how we use friends.
We're going to be using friends data to do risk prediction. We're going to do a much better job of figuring out who is at risk and who's not at risk
for certain outcomes like weight gain or heart attack, diabetes, by looking at the outcomes of a person's friends.
And so I do think that there's going to be this role for specialty social networks online to supplement the general kind of health communication
that goes on Facebook. And maybe what ends up happening is some communication between those networks that we take advantage of in order
to bring that information into the health care system, in order to be able to use it to make everybody healthier. Even though I might only have a small effect on you,
as my friend, if you are connected to 5 or 10 other people and they're each connected to 5 or 10 other people, there's this exponential power.
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