Anybody who has worn a hand-me-down, shared a bathroom or survived a long car trip with a brother or a sister knows that siblings can affect your life in nearly every way possible.
Researchers, however, are just starting to unspool the ways those relationships affect health.
“It’s kind of an underdeveloped area,” said Dr. Susan B. Sisson, a professor of nutritional sciences at University of Oklahoma Health Sciences in Oklahoma City who has studied sibling-health connections. But research is hinting at the power of siblings – or their absence.
Evidence suggests that siblings have “a pretty strong influence” on health behaviors related to obesity, physical activity, nutrition and more, Sisson said.
The research can be challenging. For starters, “families are pretty complex,” Sisson said. Siblings can be connected by birth, adoption or stepparents.
“It’s really tough to make any kind of blanket statement about sibling relationships and influence, because there’s just so many factors that need to be considered,” said Dr. Keith Vakafatu Osai, an assistant professor of child and family studies at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.
But Osai, whose own research has looked at how siblings affect one another’s decisions to play youth sports, said there’s no denying the powerful role siblings have in shaping one another.
“We typically say that this is the most enduring relationship, out of all relationships,” he said. “We’re with our parents when we’re born – but our siblings are typically there,” too. Spouses and significant others may come and go, but siblings are still there. “And then our parents pass away,” he said, “but our siblings are still there.”
Here are some of the links researchers have found between siblings and various health factors.
How we eat
Sisson was co-author on a study, published in 2019 in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, that compared…
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