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Obesity Contagious?
An anonymous reader writes "University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have found that certain human viruses may cause obesity, and by extension make being severely overweight a contagious condition. 'It makes people feel more comfortable to think that obesity stems from lack of control,' the lead researcher says. 'It's a big mental leap to think you can catch obesity.' But other diseases once chalked up to environmental factors, like stomach ulcers, are now known to stem from infectious agents."
Funny how this virus is so widespread in the United States.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the availability of junk food and the national automobile culture.
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There are, as with all things, multiple factors:
;).
1. Genetics
2. Environment
3. Disease
Someone who is prone to ulcers (genetics) and works as a stock trader on the floor of Wall Street and doesn't eat well/doesn't exercise (environment) and catches the right germ (disease) is more likely to come down with an ulcer than the sheep herder in Wyoming who's only worry is someone using the word "brokeback" to them.
The same thing could be here. I know people who have struggled with their weight - they exercise, they try to eat well, and yet the pounds don't come off. Perhaps, like ulcers, there can be a simple protein check before dieting and exercise of "OK - looks like you have the virus. Let's clear that up while we change your eating and exercise habits", which will give many people hope before they have to resort to surgery.
Hopefully it won't just be an excuse for the lazy, like the Wall Street trader who'd rather take a pill for the ulcer rather than taking time out to go relax with their family and loved ones.
Now, with that said, I'm heading out and getting a whopper
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The cure to obesity is to eat and live healthier, but it is clear that lifestyle is not the only cause. Many overweight people eat less and exercise more than other people with more ideal weights.
English is easier said than done.
The two most common causes of obesity are compulsive overeating (which is an actual addition and can often only be effectively treated as such), and gratuitous overeating (where the person is just a slob). The latter is rarer than you might think, as being a slob is not much of a survival trait. Addictions, however, are often derived from survival traits. Severely deranged ones, but survival traits nonetheless.
Now, addictive behaviours can appear to be contageous, as extreme dysfunctions tend to create extreme stress in others, which can in turn cause those others to become dysfunctional themselves. (We're talking fairly extreme cases, here.) As such, any research that theorises pathogens must first eliminate acutely dysfunctional groups. Otherwise, you're going to end up chasing shadows.
Eliminating acutely dysfunctional researchers who are paid by corporate sponsors to achieve pre-defined results would also be a good idea, but that would eliminate 95% of all researchers, which could cause problems down the road.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yes, we will have hordes of overweight people going "See, told you so! I'm sick!"
What they will conveniently forget is convervation of energy: The only way someone can gain weight is by eating too much, compared to how much energy their bodies spend on moving and keeping you alive. End of discussion.
No matter which disease one may have, you will not catch 25 pounds from taking a stroll through the mall or, say, through breathing thin air. If a disease lowers the energy requirements of the body, the cure is to eat proportionally less.
TFA isn't clear on this, but I wonder precisely what is suggested being the cause of obesity in 'infected' individuals. Are they saying people simply become unable to control the urge to eat uncontrolled amounts of unhealthy foods?
So how do you catch 'soccer moms', no bikes as kids, McD dinners and no exercise in school?
Also strange is the fact that ulcers were commonplace all over the world, due to often being an infectious disease. Yet I wonder why the Europeans haven't 'caught' obesity on the US level yet? It is not like we haven't been mingling with them for, say, a few hundred years.
What is to say that some viruses might also be affecting this?
If some treatment can just help a person who has struggled against weight their whole life have a slightly easier struggle without harming their body in a more severe way then more power to them.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Different people output different amounts of energy. Some people burn hundreds of calories just sitting in front of the TV, because they are jittery. Others can work out every day and still just barely keep up with the caloric intake of a healthy diet.
If staying in shape comes relatively easy for you, I find it quite repugnant to ascribe the failure of less-lucky folk to stay skinny to some moral shortcoming.
And I'm saying this as somebody who runs 3-4 miles a day and drastically limits his sugar intake. For me, staying healthy is a part-time career that occupies a good chunk of my day. As hard as it is for me, I know for a fact that there are a lot of overweight people who could not possibly live my lifestyle. For one thing, their knees would cruble in a matter of weeks. For another, their various food cravings are a lot stronger than mine.
Maybe some of them can pull it off, but there are addictive drugs out there which have a better rate of recovery than obesity. Shouldn't we all consider that there may be more treatment required than shouting "stop being so lazy, fatty" at them?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Also, we used to run after our food and throw spears at it before we could eat. Or even walk a long ways to find enough berries to nibble on. Now, we just hop in our cars and drive to the grocery store. Gobs of food, AND little or no physical exertion to get it. That's not what our bodies were designed for.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
While I definitely believe that in humans, the power of suggestion and the placebo effect are quite powerful.
That's why, though, that we do double-blind studies, and tests on animals.
I doubt the animals in the study were susceptible to suggestion - yet the ones with one of the virii did indeed become more obese.
When I was in my 20's, I was lean as a rail and I probably kept 3 grocery stores in business single-stomached. Now, I'm 20 years older, 80 pounds heavier, and I eat a tiny fraction of what I did then.
I don't run 3-4 miles a day, but I'm not a couch potato either. I take regular walks in the good weather, and use the stairs instead of the elevator, but it doesn't seem to help.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The problem is that I don't have the time to put out the energy (of all kinds) that weight loss requires. I work two jobs (one for God, and one for currency) and at the end of the day I'm /tired/, and I simply don't have the energy to ask myself how many calories my dinner has. I just want to eat something and collapse on the account.
The real bottom line of this article, along with related research into Syndrome X, etc. is that me and people like me are placed at an enormous disadvantage because, due to genetics or a virus or whatever, we are handicapped when it comes to weight loss. It's not that we are physiologically impossible to reduce eating, but that everything in our culture works against it and it just becomes too much damned hassle.
Our society makes allowances for people with other sorts of handicaps -- e.g. wheelchair ramps. Should we also make allowances for people with lousy metabolisms? For example ... why shouldn't restaraunt chains be required to provide calorie counts on a meal, printed on the menu? All the fast food places already do this, but you have to ask for it, and it's much harder to get this information "on the fly" for non fast-food restaraunts. This information would would be especially helpful if it included the Glycemic Index.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Most people could gain or lose a couple dozen pounds through changes in diet and excercise, this is true. However, there are *also* factors not in the individual's control which may be much larger. More and more the evidence suggests that (for those with no lack of basic protein) excercise causes one to lose weight not because of "burning fat", but because it signals the body to store less fat.
Ultimately, body chemistry determines what percentage of calories are stored as fat, and what percentage are eliminated. There are cases of obese people starving themselves to death while remaining obese. Sometimes the body just malfunctions.
It seems like you feel a strong need to force your values on others.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Okay, so there are lots and lots of comments here that boil down to "put the cheeseburger down!", but in a stunning reversal, I actually RTFA. True, people should try to eat well, and on the whole I agree that most people should spend a little more time walking (or biking, or jogging, or whatever) and a little less time in front of the television. That being said, the article raises some interesting possibilities. If viral activity could be a cause of weight-gain, I'd rather know about it than simply insist that the guy who's oozing out of the sides of his seat down the aisle from me has no self-control.
There was a time when illness was "obviously" the result of evil spirits playing havoc on people who were not devout enough. I'll bet at some point there were people standing around the village square commenting on how "if that fool had just spent a little more time praying than [insert sinful activity here], he obviously wouldn't be lying on the ground hacking up a lung and burning up from fever". Just because this line of research goes against what we believe to be common-knowledge isn't really a reason to jump all over it, we can be wrong.
So, no, it's clearly not an excuse to give up eating well or exercising, but I'm not going to just say there's nothing to this until there's been a bit more study.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Please don't forget one other major factor -
Food used to be fairly simple. Thousands of years of grains/meats/herbs combined with moderately low heat on an individual basis. Modern food processing (for those of us that eat in such countries) involves food processes, chemicals, and techniques that we certainly did not evolve for. High fructose corn syrup in almost everything (hamburger buns? WTF?), foods created by superheating and injecting gases, and foods assembled in a laboratory are definately a curve ball.
I doubt anyone would drink soda if they actually had to form it from its core components. I can handle cooking steak, pastries, etc. I know how to grow/hunt the ingredients for most foods. Where does one hunt the wild aspartame? How do you go about making msg? If you had to do it in your kitchen, would you even bother?
Also, my pet theory is that humans are designed to be social eaters (sharing the kill, the harvest, etc). Company makes foods better. Ever smell a McDonald's burger that smells as good as a backyard barbecue one? Now, however, a lot of people wolf down their food by themselves in the car, or while working. They don't stop to pay attention to it, and they also frequently ingest several hundred calories of soda while eating.
Just my two bits.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Our society makes allowances for people with other sorts of handicaps -- e.g. wheelchair ramps.
Except that you can lose weight, someone in a wheelchair cannot grow legs/nerves/bones (or whatever else is preventing them from being able to walk). You said yourself it wouldn't be easy to lose weight, but it is possible. For better or worse, your weight is your responsibility. It is inappropriate for you to expect society to conform to your needs. It's different when someone cannot change their condition, which is why we (try to) make things easier for the lame, the blind, the deaf, and, of course, Pamela Anderson.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Quitting cold turkey is just as effective as any other method, so even though you tried, your attempt at a witty analogy fails.
You completely missed my point.
Telling people to "stop eating and exercise more" appears to be reducing obesity about as well as telling junkies to quit cold turkey reduces heroin use. In other words, almost not at all.
I'm with the other poster who suggested that all of you shouting "it's fatso's fault that he's fat" without considering the evidence are just as bad as the ID people who refuse to even consider the evidence.
TFA is about a study which says there might be a viral pathology which is contributing to obesity, if not outright causing it in some cases. Since this shakes up the world-view of some of you, you're stamping your feet and throwing a tantrum over it.
Sorry if this new science is showing that you might not automatically be better people that those who are fatter than you, but I'm going to side with the guys in the lab-coats on this debate.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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and an icy cold Coca-Cola
I'm surprised that after reading all the comments nobody has said anything about soda. Calories from soda are huge. A 2L bottle of soda runs about 2000 calories. If you have your main liquid consumption from soda you're probably drinking about 2 of these a week.
Switch over to water (0 calories), and you'll drop 4000 calories/week out of your diet instantly. That's almost 600 calories a day. It will make a difference. Get a Brita if you can't stand the taste of tap water, buy bottled water if you must spend money on your beverages.
But don't complain to me about being fat and then go grab the Big Gulp of Coke. You won't get any sympathy here.
Lack of self-control has essentially nothing to do with it. With near-superhuman self-control an obese person might substitute external feedback (i.e. from a scale) for the internal signals and control his weight that way. But that means ignoring continuous gnawing hunger - forever.
You know, its funny. There are people like this - honestly like this - they have things like Pradr Willis syndrome and are incredibly rare. They're also unfortunate and tend to die at very young ages.
There are also people like you and me. Heck, I was a chubby kid; I was a fat adult. I was obese, and then some. I enjoyed food and took comfort in the fact that while I was "a bit overweight" at 240+ lbs (I'm 6' tall) I wasn't really any fatter than many of the people around me. Then one day I looked in the mirror and saw that my 38" pants were getting tight, and said, basically, "Hey, I'm fat."
I started to exercise, watched what I ate (a bit), and I've lost almost 80 lbs. I never thought I was obese, but anyone who can lose 80 lbs (without getting down to a "washboard abs" level of body fat, mind you, just a moderately healthy weight) is, by definition, obese. Or was, in my case.
For me, and for many, many other people I've met, its purely about self-control and body image. And its something that they, as I, can do something about. Yes, there are some people with severe medical issues that cause their obesity but if you're reading this and you're fat, chances are really really high that its because you're inactive and like eating, not that you've got some rare disorder. Sorry, but that's the truth.
Pity those who have uncontrollable ilnesses. Don't be an enabler for the vast majority who don't.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!