EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Modeling Body Mass Variation: Incorporating Social Influence into Calculations of Caloric Intake and Energy Expenditure

Ana María Hernández-Hernández and Rodrigo Huerta-Quintanilla

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 11, 1-11

Abstract: Variations in individual body mass and composition have long been a key focus in the health sciences, particularly now that overweight and obesity are considered as public health problems. We study a mathematical model that describes body mass variations which are determined by the energy balance between caloric intake and total energy expenditure. To calculate the change in caloric intake and energy expenditure over time, we proposed a relationship for each of these quantities, and we used measured values that are reported in the literature for the initial conditions. To account for small variations in the daily energy balance of an individual, we include social interactions as the multiplication of two terms: social proximity and social influence. We observe that social interactions have a considerable effect when the body mass of an individual is quite constant and social interactions take random values. However, when an individual's mass value changes (either increases or decreases), social interactions do not have a notable effect. In our simulation, we tested two different models that describe the body mass composition, and it resulted that one fits better the data.

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111709 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.13 ... 11709&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0111709

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0111709

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-05
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0111709