Anyone see the programme on channel 4 (UK) last night? I didn't mean to catch it but it was interesting if not quite amazing that an indian doctor says that a virus can cause obsesity.

Anyone got more info as I onoy caught some of the show, plus what u make of it?

It has come form India (from fattening chickens or something) and spread to america (obviously ) and even England


They tested the virus on monkeys and chickens and it fattened them up. BUT they have not yet tested it on humans for ethical reasons.

I'm so annoyed I missed that program

Yeah apparantly. I wish I caught more of the programme now.

They had an example of 2 identical twins who were always the same weight untill they both went off to different colleges. A few months later, one of the twins was fatter. I know maybe it was because she ate more etc.....but what I'm saying is their whole lives they were identical down to the last pound, so the assumption is that the virus was caught at college.

It goes after skinny people and virus works with fat cells inside the body (or something like that) and makes u fat. Then after it has, the virus moves on to someone else.....something to that degree anyway

That's trippy. Did they discuss a cure?

This is just about the least scientific thing I've ever heard.

Nope. Once u got it, u get fat. No cure.....but as I said it does escpae the body again I think, but by then, the "damage" or "work" has been done.

People who were obese were screened and found that SOME actually had the virus.


Some eggheads don't believe the theory and maybe they are right? But from what I saw, it seemed to be on to something as often people have said they have exercised just as much as usual and not eaten any more fatty foods then usual yet they still put on weight. Plus it happens quickly too.....

I know what u mean, I ain't good at explaining this, but why not?

thesexofit said:

Anything's possible I guess...

taken from the channel 4 web site who screened the documentary


could fat be catching?
by Jenny Bryan

Could a fat virus be responsible for the epidemic of obesity that is sweeping the USA and seems to be spreading to Britain? Obesity scientist, Dr Nikhil Dhurandhar thinks that it is and has some intriguing research findings to back him up. But he knows that other obesity specialists cannot believe it's that simple.


© Getty
'The concept of a virus causing obesity is so far away from mainstream causes of obesity that it's going to take much more convincing and evidence simply because it's a very different idea. But we'll do it,' predicts Dr Dhurandhar, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

In the USA 61% of people are now officially classed as obese (with a body mass index, BMI, of over 30) or overweight (BMI of 25-30). The situation is scarcely any better in the UK, with about 20% of people obese and over 40% overweight.

If you look at a map of obesity in the USA, you can watch the epidemic spreading rather like a forest fire from the east coast to the west over the last 20 years. And it is this, says Dhurandhar, which suggests that there could be an infection.

it started with chickens …
Dhurandhar's story starts in Bombay in the 1980s with a mysterious epidemic that wiped out hundreds of thousands of chickens. The birds were found to be infected with an adenovirus called SMAM-1. Adenoviruses are very common. There are at least 40 types that affect humans and they cause about 1 in 20 cases of chest infection.

What was intriguing about the Indian chickens with SMAM-1 was not so much that they were probably killed by an adenovirus infection, but that they died plump, with a large pale liver and large kidneys. They weren't thin and emaciated as you might expect an animal with a virus to be.

Working in India, Dhurandhar deliberately infected some more chickens with the same virus and, sure enough, these birds also put on weight. He decided to pursue his research in the USA, but the US government wasn't keen on him importing a virus that had wiped out a large portion of the Indian chicken population.

Instead, Dhurandhar borrowed a human adenovirus, called Ad-36, from the US collection and set to work infecting first chickens and then rhesus monkeys and marmosets. Like the chickens, infected animals started to put on weight. Six months after they were infected, three male marmosets put on three times as much weight and doubled their body fat compared to three animals that were not infected. It was a very small study, but the results were still impressive.

It wouldn't be ethical to infect humans with Ad-36 to see if they got fat. But, as the virus does occur naturally in the human population, Dhurandhar decided to compare infection rates in people who were fat with those who weren't. He tested 500 people in three cities. Thirty per cent of obese people screened positive for the Ad-36 virus, compared with only 5 to 10% of those who were not overweight.

how the fat virus might work
Dhurandhar – and his critics – wanted to know how a fat virus might work. Dhurandhar showed that Ad-36 appeared to increase the size and number of fat cells in infected animals. In the laboratory, his experiments suggested that Ad-36 encourages pre-fat cells with the potential to become fat cells to do just that. Three times as many pre-fat cells became fat cells when they were exposed to Ad-36 compared with fat cells that weren't exposed to the virus.

twin studies
As part of his studies to try and convince other obesity researchers about the importance of the fat virus, Dhurandhar turned to a set of identical twins, Christyn and Beth. Born with exactly the same genes, there was no chance that one twin was genetically more likely to put on weight than the other. Until they went to college, the twins did indeed remain a very similar weight – as do nearly all sets of identical twins. But in the two years after Christyn left home to go to college, she became two and a half stone heavier than her twin. Blood tests showed that, while Beth remained Ad-36 negative, Christen had, at some point, been infected with the virus. Did the virus make her put on weight or did she just eat more and exercise less when she went to college? Who knows, but Dhurandhar blames it on the virus.

Others remain sceptical.

'The idea that a virus may be causing obesity seems intrinsically unlikely,' says Professor Stephen Bloom, from Imperial College, London. 'Obesity has been growing at a constant rate for about 50 years and the causes are pretty obvious. People have been eating much more and taking less exercise. Why do you need to invent some strange story about a virus?'

Virologist, Professor William Russell, from the University of St Andrews, points out that adenoviruses have never been linked with a long-term illness, like obesity. They cause short-term infections and disappear. It's important to keep an open mind but, at present, the evidence just does not stack up, he says.

a vaccine against obesity?
In the USA, some scientists are more prepared to accept that viruses could be involved.

'Viruses can lie dormant for many years and we've seen the crossover of the HIV virus, for example, from animals to humans. We may be seeing a similar thing now with the obesity virus,' suggests Dr John Foreyt from Baylor College, Texas.

'We really don't know why people get fat or why people are skinny. There's so much that is unknown and that's why we need new theories and people looking at why our bodies are the way they are,' he says.

One possible hypothesis is that, in the late '70s, someone working on a chicken farm in India had the Ad-36 virus and came in contact with birds with SMAM-1. The two viruses got together, exchanged genetic material, and turned into a hybrid virus capable of infecting humans and making them fat. There is nothing, of course, to confirm this series of events, but Dr Dhurandhar now has research grants to help him develop his theories. He has his sights set on a vaccine against the fat virus, but accepts that could be some way off:

'It would be absolutely fascinating to have a vaccine to prevent at least some types of obesity virus – that's my dream,' he says.

Thanx.....my expanations were rather cluttered. But at least some will know now thanx to me.

thesexofit said:

you are welcome, thought i would help you out a little

lollyp0p said:

That's the university I used to work for and graduated from

Obesity is caused by junk food, fast food, and processed food in combination with sitting on your ass. This is just an example of trying to place the blame away from the individual who let themselves get obese.

I tell you what I find interesting is that the same people I see working out at the gym everyday next to me or the same people that I see running alongside me everynight after work or on weekends just don't seem to catch this virus.

Apparantly the virus is spread through hostess cupcakes and sitting on your ass

lovemachine said:

i don't believe it to be honest

almost as funny as the memory of water

Magnified image of the obesity virus attacking normal blood cells.....

Stax said:

I had the urge to go to Jack in the Crack tonight I resisted luckily, but I haven't been weak & disgusting like that in a LONG time

CalhounSq said:

Although a physiological effect of a viral infection could be weight gain (highly unlikely, though), the average couch potato fat ass is not caused by a virus.

Clearly, the pharmaceutical companies still want to brand it a disease so they can sell more pills.

Stax said:

Stax said:

Shit....obesity is caused by stuffing your face with crap and being a lazy sloth. PERIOD!!!

Wow...lots of hateful attitudes for chubby people on this thread... If you disagree with the virus claim (which, I do) then attack the study itself...not the people who are overweight.

Oh...and check this out...

http://www.consumerfreedo...rticle/141

I thought it was interesting

Common Sense and Health

Is Logic the Latest Victim of 'Obesity Epidemic'?

By: Dan Mindus
Newspaper: San Francisco Chronicle

A World Health Organization panel recently concluded that a 5-foot-6 man or woman of Asian descent weighing 137 pounds should be considered "overweight." That would place the trim Hiroyuki Sanada, one of Tom Cruise's co-stars in "The Last Samurai," just a few pounds shy of this category.
Welcome to the politics of fat, where bathroom scales can be tax- deductible, lawyers are lining up to sue anything rumored to contain calories and the media have fed us a steady diet of hysteria and hyperbole. In this twilight zone of fat panic, something called the Body Mass Index (BMI) uses only our height and weight to divide us into categories: obese, overweight and government approved.

A BMI of 30 or more makes you "obese"; at 5-foot-7 and 201 pounds, Tom Cruise's magic number is 31. If the WHO gets its way, Asians will join the "last samurai" in the obese category if their BMI hits 26 (5-foot-7 and 163 pounds, for example). A BMI of just 22 -- perfectly "healthy" for most of us, even by WHO's ever-tightening standards -- will make an Asian "overweight."

The global love-handle police insist on this ridiculous BMI standard, which classifies 61 percent of Americans as overweight or obese. You have probably heard that number. Along with the claim that obesity costs the United States $117 billion a year and kills 300,000 Americans annually, it is one of the three most commonly cited figures associated with our so-called obesity epidemic. But it's more like an epidemic of bad statistics. All three of these numbers are seriously flawed.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledge that these results are counterintuitive: "Overweight may or may not be due to increases in body fat. It may also be due to an increase in lean muscle." This explains why the new governor of California (6-foot-2, 257 pounds, BMI of 33) is officially obese, too. For the rest of us, however, the story is a bit more complicated. One night in 1998, more than 39 million Americans went to sleep at a government-approved weight and woke up "overweight," thanks to an arbitrary shift in the BMI cutoff for "overweight" status.

The standard that we abandoned in 1998 had the virtue of distinguishing between men and women -- something we don't even attempt to do anymore. Now the WHO wants to start determining "acceptable" BMI levels according to race - - making Jackie Chan (5-foot-8, 160 pounds, BMI 24) our latest "overweight" movie star.

The claim that excess weight kills 300,000 Americans each year is bizarre in its assumption that overweight people are officially immune to all other causes of death. As insane as it sounds, if Cruise were to kick the bucket for any reason, he would count toward the mythical 300,000 total.

The New England Journal of Medicine knows this is bogus. In an editorial, the journal's editors wrote that the 300,000 figure "is by no means well- established," and that it is "derived from weak or incomplete data." Still, this flawed number finds its way into nearly every public discussion about obesity -- as does the spurious claim that obesity costs Americans more than $100 billion every year. That figure is derived from a single 1998 study published by the journal Obesity Research. This study had serious limitations. The authors acknowledged that their methods allowed for the "double-counting of costs" that "would inflate the cost estimate." They also admitted that "height and weight are not included in many of the primary data sources" that they relied upon.

Worse yet, these bean-counters used the wrong definition of obesity. Traditionally, a BMI of 30 or more makes you obese, but the authors decided to arbitrarily set their threshold at 29. A small error? Not at all. They wound up wrongly including the health costs of more than 10 million Americans.

Unfortunately, activist groups are all too happy to build their nutritional utopias on the shaky ground of these faulty obesity statistics. The guiltiest in the bunch are the self-described "food police" at the Center for Science in the Public Interest -- the traditional advocates of "sin" taxes on foods they don't want you to eat. A health-advocacy group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine also uses these bogus stats to force a vegetarian diet down our collective throats. Then there's the American Obesity Association, which aggressively promotes these numbers in its quest to have obesity classified as a "disease" -- for the financial gain of the manufacturers of the weight-loss drug and products who pay its bills.

Basic logic dictates that obesity is no more a disease than couch potato- itis, that replacing milk and chicken with tofu won't magically melt the pounds and that Tom Cruise isn't fat. But obesity scares and cooked numbers have tipped the scales against common sense.

http://www.consumerfreedo...m/oped/164

applekisses said:

I would like to say that Obesity is alot different than just being alittle bit over weight. And I think peoples attitudes are not very holistic.

A person behaves the way they do for a reason and even if they are eating far too much and not doing anything constructive to loose weight there are often more complex reasons behind it.

My mom who is now under 8 stone put on huge ammounts of weight when her mother died, she was then depressed not only about her loss but about the fact society saw her as lazy, she was nervous when going out and became reclusive so was doing even less, she was scared of what people would think of her and the weight pilled on more.

she managed to pull through and find a way out, but please don't think all over weight people are that way due to the fact they just eat too much and are lazy there are often more factors affecting thier behavior and by being so critical it will only make there situation worse

did i ramble?

lollyp0p said:

You didn't...everything you said made perfect sense

applekisses said:

wow that makes a change

lollyp0p said:

I agree with your rant!

RocknRollisalive said:

hang on you agree with me