Silly me. For years, I've mistakenly believed that I was responsible for my eating habits.

After all, no one forces me to eat poorly, over-indulge in high-fat foods, or skip a workout or three. Therefore, I assumed that any foolish choices are simply my own fault. But, in fact, the real culprit has been my friends. At least, that's the word from the experts (or alleged experts, anyway) who believe that it's our friends—not ourselves— who make us fat.

According to a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine, obesity is socially contagious, and it spreads from friend to friend.

If your friends are obese, then you are at much greater risk of becoming obese too, according to a team of medical sociologists who tracked the social networks of some 12,000 people over the course of about 30 years.

They found that if one person became obese, their friends were 57 percent more likely to do the same. And if a friend lost weight, then chances were higher that they'd drop some pounds as well.

In fact, the experts found that our friends' lifestyles are far more likely to influence our weight than the eating habits of our siblings or spouses.

In a broad sense, I do understand their point. Our environment definitely affects how and what we eat. For instance, If my lunch companions make five trips all-you-can-eat buffet, experts suspect that I'd be more likely to do the same.

Then again, during the past few years, I've watched several friends lose weight, some as much as 45 pounds. (Sadly, they didn't infect me with an improved eating and exercise regime.) Other friends have seen the scale creep steadily upwards over the years. (My scale is resists budging—up or down.)

Now, I've never had a paper published in a venerable medical journal, nor have I spent 30-odd years tracking complex social networks. In other words, I'm not qualified to say that this study strikes me as more bunk science.

However, I have spent about 30-odd years managing my weaknesses for pepperoni pizza or chocolate cupcakes. I've learned to control these cravings, but I can't banish them entirely.

If put any stock in this study—which I just can't seem to do—then the healthiest thing I could is to immediately drop my heavy friends and seek out only super-skinny people from now on.

Of course, the problem is that all my super-skinny new friends would end up dropping me. And who could blame them? They'd just catch my craving for pizza or cupcakes.