My Mom said we can't be friends....because your fat

I know that title is a little disheartning but it really could come out of a child's mouth soon after researchers found that kids eat more when they hang out with an obese child. Here is an excerpt from the article in Newsweek :

Now a new study by researchers at the University of Buffalo suggests an even more radical idea: banning fat friends from eating together. Sarah-Jeanne Salvy, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the university's School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and her colleagues found that fat kids consume significantly more calories when they chow down with friends who are also overweight than when they eat with lean friends.

In the study, published in the August issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers randomly paired 23 overweight and 42 normal-weight children between the ages of 9 and 15 with either a friend or a kid they did not know. There were 33 friend pairs and 39 stranger pairs. Each pair of kids spent 45 minutes in a room that contained puzzles, games, and bowls of both healthy snacks (in this case, baby carrots and grapes) and calorie-rich treats (potato chips and cookies). The kids could eat as much as they wanted, but only from their own bowls. The researchers monitored the youngsters on closed-circuit TV. Afterward they weighed the uneaten snacks to figure out how many calories the kids had consumed.

The results showed that in general, friends who ate together took in more calories than youngsters who were unfamiliar with their partner. That was true for both fat and thin kids. Not surprisingly, overweight kids ate more than lean kids, whether or not they were paired with a friend. And they ate even more when they were paired with another overweight youngster. The greatest number of calories was consumed by two overweight friends eating together in what Salvy describes as a kind of synergistic effect. "Being friends increased food intake, being overweight and eating with an overweight [person] increased eating, and when you combined those, the overweight friends were eating about 700 calories," Salvy says. (The lean kids consumed several hundred fewer calories.) And, she points out, this is snack food—which means they were consuming a good chunk of their daily calories in that one sitting.

Growing up always being chubby or fat, whatever you want to call it, I know that it was tough enough just trying to fit in. I was lucky enough that my charisma and humor allowed me to have more friends than bullies that picked on my weight. But I know that if another kid had told me we could not hang out because of my weight that would have really hurt my feelings. I think the article brings up some very valid points, but doing this to a child might do some major psychological damage to them down the road. I just hope that any parent that follows through on what the article is suggesting remembers how fragile the psyche of a child is, and how hard that will be for the obese child to hear. What are your thoughts?