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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."
"Lois, everyone has their sanctuary. The Catholics have churches, fat people have Wisconsin, and I have the Pawtucket Brewery."
... or maybe they do but you're not supposed to consume them by the metric tonne? Having never tried said tomfoolery, I'm not sure how it works.
... remember, it's not that you're inactive or eat a lot. Thanks to technology, there are pills to cure obesity--3 AM TV told me so.
- Peter in Wasted Talent
Beer and cheese must not fall under the Atkins diet
Looks like those 'sconnies found an excuse
My work here is dung.
clear cut and easy to remember: "Burger King", "McDonalds", etc.
I'm not fat, I'm diseased.
Here's an interesting report from FP Magazine on obesity as a global epidemic. Interesting to note that obesity seems to occur independent of the financial factors that you would assume cause obesity. Report is a PDF download. tcd004
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.
If I fully cook it, can I eat fat people without getting fat?
There are some staggering data in there regarding the extent to which humans mimic the behavior of similar others. For example, there are statistically significant increases in the number of teenage-couples killed in car accidents among those teenage-couples who recently heard about accidents where teenage couples were killed. The increase is not observed in teenage-couples who didn't hear about the recent accidents, and is not observed among singleton teenagers or older couples who have been exposed to the news. These results have been repeated with a wide range of demographic groups, on a wide range of phenomena, and have been found to be consistent and strong. Hmm, notice a rash of mine accidents recently? Yes, I'm sure it's media focus-bias to some extent...
I really urge you to check that book out if you're interested in the instinct-level mental processes that control us without our being aware of them, or if you want to be..ah...evil?
Despite my attempts to keep this comment civil, I'm sure some will take offense...
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Does anybody have pointers to numbers for the other two viruses?
Viruses aren't the only medical condition that can cause obesity, by the way. Various hormonal problems (thyroid comes to mind) can cause obesity as well. Even so, I'm expecting that they'll still find tha more than half of North American obesity is not environment related (other than an environment with an abundance of food).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
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.
Look, the cause of obesity is really very simple: the human body (and its ancestors) evolved in environments in which food was scarce, and during that time mechanisms came into being which helped to deal with that scarcity. As a result, it has built-in mechanisms to ensure that there will be sufficient energy store for the body to use for all but the most drastic of food shortages. These mechanisms include the fat store, the tendency for fat to accumulate much more easily than it's used, and an appetite control mechanism that encourages overeating (since who knows when the next meal will become available?).
Now take the human body and put it into an environment where all the food one could ever want is easily available for the taking (all it requires is a small amount of money). What do you expect will happen?
Well, duh...the body will behave as it always has: under the assumption that while food might be plentiful now, it's not likely to be plentiful for long, so better stock up now while it can.
And thus, obesity.
And the reason obesity is so difficult to deal with, and why sustained weight loss has such a lousy track record (95%+ failure rate), is simple: to fight obesity, you have to fight your own body's instinctive drive to "save up for a rainy day".
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
If you read just the blurb posted here, you'll see that the researchers say "it is easier to think of obesity as having something to do with willpower"[paraphrasing.] Most of the comments on this story seem to reflect this, and are just what the researchers predicted you'd say.
The point is the idea that obesity might not be something that you control really is frightening to us.
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.
...swimmng, biking, I guess the virus just can't catch up with you. Or maybe the increased oxygen levels kill it, or something in all those vegatables. Oh, wait.. this is slashdot... I better stop before someone takes this comment seriously.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who did the study is named Professor Creosote.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
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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.
They're fattening up their cattle a.k.a. us!
I hear "Armageddon" means "Great Feast" in Gray.
Those skinny little bastards must be hungry! Look at 'em!
</conspiracy theory>
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
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.
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.
If you eat less than your body requires, by definition, you die. Being able to eat less and lose weight instead of starving while fat depends on the ability to get blood sugar out of fat, which is compromised in people with a number of conditions. It also depends on having a low-calorie source of non-energy nutrients, which is often expensive. It also depends on being able to maintain a reasonable blood sugar level without more energy being taken out as fat.
For people without a medical condition that causes obesity, it is possible to take in fewer calories and run off of fat instead. But there are a number of medical conditions which can interfere with this process, which depends on a non-trivial cascade of signals between different organs (something has to detect that your blood sugar is low; it has to release a hormone in response; the fat cells have to respond to this hormone; they have to produce sugar from fat; the fat cells have to stop pulling sugar out of the bloodstream and storing the energy). This research found that some people are obese because of a particular virus. Of course, most of the people they looked at probably just eat too much, but not everybody.
both good points. Sleep is always overlooked! Although the only real way to lose weight is eat less + exercise more, as someone who was once heavy then lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off it became clear that there isn't a linear relationship between effort and results.
At least for me there were certain "weight plateaus" where it took longer to lose 5 lbs than at other times. Conversely, once in a plateau it was relatively easy to stay there as it required a certain amount of effort to gain weight. This so-called virus perhaps affects the body in a similar fashion, but if such a virus exists my interest would be why do some people have it but not others? What is the transmission vector?
There's an great website by John Walker (founder of Autodesk) called The Hackers Diet that explores the nature of weight from a chemical/engineering perspective. Also provides a series of Excel spreadsheets to monitor weight loss/gain
:: the general public is as disinterested in advanced art as ever
Crash dieting prevents you from getting the nutrients you need. Even a perfectly balanced 1-meal a day cannot, repeat CAN NOT, deliver the proper nutrients because they absorbed at different rates, requiring 3~5 small meals a day to keep them in your system w/o passing. That's why there's no supervitamin that has everything you need for a day: you'd really need a drip IV to do this.
Second, you can eat 3,000 kcal a day and still lose weight: exercising uses calories.
Third, whether or not you experience ill effects from your personal dieting strategy depends on genetic history, such as hypertension, cholesterol, diabetes, etc.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
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.
My wife and I put our son into daycare at 3 months. After maybe two months, we changed his formula intake -- 2, 8oz bottles instead of 3 4-oz bottles to try to shift his feeding into the daytime and get him off a nighttime bottle.
We got immediate "feedback" from the staff about "cutting" his intake. I had to explain to them that it was actually a net increase for daytime feeding (16 vs. 12 oz) and his overall intake was actually up by 4 oz. They politely disagreed and we said we'd change it back if problems arose. After a week it was a non-issue.
After thinking about it, I realized what the real issue was -- the staff liked to feed him more frequently and we believed they were actually using the feeding as a way to soothe him; the feeding times for the bottles varied quite a bit. By cutting him to two bottles a day, they were "losing" a soothing option.
It was then that I started thinking about the staff; all of them would qualify as overweight, three of them would probably qualify as obese and one of them probably is pushing the morbidly obese standard.
I started wondering if the childhood obesity phenomenon couldn't partly be traced to daycare; at an early age, if given the opportunity, the staff will use food the way they probably use it themselves -- as a way to soothe and manage anxiety.
I'm probably stretching this a lot, but it doesn't seem entirely unrealistic. Kids in increasingly large numbers since the 1970s have been put into daycares, and they've been subjected to food as a behavior modifier -- soothing babies, calming toddlers, and so on. The fact that daycare providers are, by and large, at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder probably also means that the kids are being subjected to the caregivers own poor habits as well.
I know there are other influences (TV, advertising, parental disregard, etc), but I do wonder if bad food choices in daycare doesn't lay the groundwork for a fairly deep-seated set of food/emotion connections that play out as the child gets older and has more opportunity to make their own food choices.
Your theory is inconsistent with the reality of hunter gatherer life (namely Bushmen). The problem is simply the abundance of food. Although farmers certainly work hard. They work much harder then their more tribal counterparts.
Bushmen do get to walk around a bit more. They're more akin to modern people that would have to walk to the corner grocery on a daily basis. Bushmen still tend to setup camp where the food is. They're not going to waste calories going too and fro when they can just move their hovels over to the next grove or whatnot.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Also, we used to run after our food and throw spears at it before we could eat.
I had to chase down a hot dog vendor today and throw spears at him before he'd stop to sell me a Chicago dog with everything and an icy cold Coca-Cola. Does that count?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The other point is that the known solutions to obesity are a response to the known causes. Nobody would think to prescribe antiviral drugs to someone who suddenly starts gaining weight without a recognizable cause (like change in diet/activity) if we didn't suspect viruses as a possible cauese of obesity (even if it is a relatively rare cause, at lest doctors might now know what special symptoms to look for).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
And ask thin people who never excercise and eat everything they find appetizing to give up their sense of moral superiority? Are you nuts? That would be like asking society to accept that morning people aren't morally superior to night owls. Everyone knows that sleeping late is just moral weakness.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's funny, whenever a discussion on obesity arises (whether on Slashdot or IRL), people seem to settle into 2 camps:
1. Eat less, exercise more! Guaranteed you'll lose weight!
2. Do you think fat people REALLY want to be fat? It's not their fault! It's their metabolisms (or a virus, perhaps)!
Call me crazy, but I think there's a bit of truth in BOTH statements.
Fact is, ON AVERAGE, the more you eat, the more weight you will gain. ON AVERAGE, the more exercise you get, the more weight you will lose. I can't see anyone disputing this, for the AVERAGE case. Hell, it really applies to everyone, but to differing degrees. Personally, I've been in both camps.
Some people burn as many calories as they intake, no matter what. I used to be one of them. 4000, 5000 calories a day, combined with sitting around watching TV, and I stayed incredibly slim. As I finally emerged from what seemed like 10 years of puberty, this changed, and changed a lot. Lately I can put a pound or two on per day, if I'm not careful. I have to be very careful in what I eat or I'll balloon up in a month - well, for someone of my weight it IS ballooning, anyway. However, I can still have weeks where I eat a ton of food, so long as I exercise myself silly. In my case, it's hiking 20kms up the side of a mountain. After that I can eat damn near everything in sight for a week. In the winter when I slow down, I have to eat a LOT less or the pounds pile on.
I think it's safe to say that most people are in a range from hummingbird to tortise when it comes to metabolism. The key is figuring out where you lie on that scale, and adjusting your habits accordingly. I know of people who will just put on fat forever. They need to eat very nutritious, low calorie foods, and get plenty of exercise in order to stay reasonably thin. Does it suck? Yup. Is it "unfair" that some people can eat whatever they want, whenever they want? Sure - but you're not going to get very far whining about it. There are some extreme cases of people who simply cannot do anything but gain weight - their bodies are totally out of whack. Seems to me that these people are in a very small minority though - or else obesity wouldn't be such a recent thing. You don't often see 400 lb people in poorer countries, for instance, and you sure didn't see many of them 100 years ago.
Some days I wish I was still 16, and could eat all the time. Then again, in those days I couldn't put on muscle to save my life, no matter what or how much I ate, or how much I exercised.
Long story short? Live with the cards you've been dealt, and know that it's actually OK to feel hungry sometimes. Far too many people insist on feeling very full after every meal - hell, after every hour for the extreme snackers out there.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.
..perhaps the anti-roundtuit. For if you get a roundtuit, you are no longer procrastinating.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
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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.
If I hadn't commented in this thread already I'd give you modpoints. It works the same way with anorexics as with obesity: there's probably nothing you or anyone else can tell a person that'll fix it. As one of my friends says, "you can't ever change people, you can only make them secretive and neurotic." Telling someone who is morbidly obese -- or in my case, for several years, deathly skinny -- to "just stop being stupid about food" is akin to telling a schizophrenic to "just stop hearing all those voices". And, hey, nice segue, did anyone else read about how toxoplasmosis infections may cause schizophrenia? If a disease can cause something that life-altering, it's not too difficult to believe a virus might change a person's metabolism by 50 calories a day (which is all you need to gain several pounds a year, leading, in ten years, to big problems.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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!
hey Alchy McAlcherson knock off the firewater is really not a helpful sentiment.
Actually, Alcoholics Anonymous has an over all going rate of exactly the same as those going cold turkey... it's somewhere around 5%. It's the same for smoking also.
Fact is that every addiction is hard to get off of, but whether "help" is supplied or not, the quitting rates are the same over time.
So, the issue becomes, we can't just tell fatties to lay off the donuts, because they won't, even though they may know they should. They could "stop" cold turkey, and try and fix it, but this leads to a "defficiency" that they try and account for the next time they stop quitting. Same as with alcoholics. Eventually, this cycle brings it self out so that they're binging hard, and having a rollercoaster of effects because of it.
My issue here is that we tell people to get a doctors advice before going on a diet, because the cause of the weight may not be within their control (a virus that would cause a store of fat regardless of their intake) or something entirely unhealthy for them (a 90lb 16 year old going "Look at my pot belly, I'm a fat little pig.")
In either of those cases, a doctors input is invaluable. In some/most cases though, it's entirely possible that just "quitting" "cold turkey" would work as well as anything else, the person "just" has to muster the willpower to to break the addiction.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
How do you go about making msg? If you had to do it in your kitchen, would you even bother?
It's not that hard.. glutamate is naturally present in many foods such as parmesan cheese, asparagus, peas, and tomatoes, and monosodium glutamate (MSG) is simply a form of glutamate that's easy to package and cook with. According to Wikipedia, MSG was first discovered in crystals left behind after evaporating kombu broth, which is a common Japanese soup stock made by heating seaweed in water. Making MSG in your own kitchen is probably easier than making baking soda, sugar, table salt, and many other basic ingredients.
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