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Although eating disorders aren't contagious in the infectious sense, they do spread through social networks.

Adolescents are especially vulnerable to the negative social influence of disordered eating and body image.

Just as negative peer influence can raise eating disorder risk, positive peer influence can lower it.

This is a question that was asked of me at a recent school event. I'll admit, my first instinct was to smile, charmed by the phrasing and touched by the genuine curiosity behind it. Of course not, I thought. Eating disorders aren't infectious the way viruses are. You can't catch one from a sneeze.

But as I sat with the question a little longer, I realized I had completely missed what was actually being asked, and what a remarkably insightful question was being asked.

Although eating disorders aren't contagious in the infectious sense, they do spread. They move through social networks, quietly and powerfully, in ways that mirror contagion more closely than most people realize.

A large study of over 700,000 teenagers found that having just one classmate diagnosed with an eating disorder increased a student's own risk by 9%. Having more than one raised that risk to 18%, within the first year alone. These aren't trivial numbers. They tell us something important about how eating disorders travel through communities, and it is something that I am seeing........

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