If obesity is contagious, why isn't good health as well?

I'm reading an interesting book right now called "Connected" by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. I'm reading it as background for my Friendship Over Time theory, specifically to explain the process of how cultural adaptation can occur over time as a process of societal change. But what is really interesting for this post is an argument that is made in Chapter 4, which is that obesity is contagious. They cite a bunch of studies and show that over time obesity can spread in groups, and eventually push itself onto outlier connected groups, up to three degrees of separation.
What never made any sense to me in their study was how come this doesn't happen with positive circumstances, like good health? How come good health doesn't spread to three degrees of separation of people?
My guess is that what they are showing is that bad things tend to spread much easier than good thing, much like communication theory shows that it is easier to push a negative message than it is a positive message. In my thesis study, when I was showing that Boris Yeltsin's message of 1991 Soviet Union's past was negative rather than the putsches' message of it being a positive past was easier to push to the public, I think there's something there. Physics shows that chaos theory tends to push disorder rather than order, meaning the universe has a tendency to spread itself out rather than contain itself in order, so why should ideas and concepts be any different?
What this means is that in order to get your friends to all want to lose weight, you have to put serious energy into the central depository of information, meaning that the state of rest for information should be one of "do nothing" and that potential energy is always there to do negative actions, pushing towards disorder, such as gaining weight and leading to less healthy outcomes. In order to turn the message, you need to put energy into the mix to achieve a higher level of valiance of energy states (so that potential energy will yield kinetic energy that leads to positive results).
So mathematically, if you want to achieve better results from your social groups, you have to put in positive energy that is stored as potential energy that can yield kinetic results that spread out to a higher level of order. In other words, energy goes uphill, requiring effort to achieve positive results, while it is very possible that if your goal is negative attributes, your potential energy required is already stored at a state of rest and is just waiting to be released.
Labels: Communication Theory, Friendship Over Time, Social Networking Sites
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