Is Obesity Caused By a Virus?

Blame it on a bug: A new study has found that a virus called AD-36 is linked to obesity. While the correlation in no way proves that this virus causes obesity, the idea that some of our extra poundage might — and I stress the word might — be the product of more than just gluttony and laziness comes, to me anyway, as a kind of revelation (though there have been rumblings about this idea for a long time).

Americans and the media have become so obsessed with the idea that folks are overly fat because they're disgusting, McDonald's-obsessed slobs. It's hard to wrap one's head around the prospect that this whole unfortunate epidemic might not be our fault after all.

Again, I stress the word might, not only because the correlation does not prove causation, but also because even if a virus is mixed up in this mess somehow, it's highly unlikely that our eating habits are going to be off the hook. We may, after all is said and done, just end up being the same disgusting slobs, only with a virus in our guts making everything worse.

The virus in question is called adenovirus 36 (AD-36), one of 50 known types of adenovirus, which infect the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts. Scientists previously discovered that AD-36 has the ability to infect immature fat cells, making them grow rapidly and multiply more than normal.

This time around a team of researchers led by Jeffrey Schwimmer of Rady Children's Hospital and the University of California studied 124 children ages 8 to 18 years old, around half of whom were considered obese. Nineteen of the children were found to have neutralizing antibodies specific to AD-36 in their blood, meaning that they had been infected with the virus. Of those 19 kids, 15 — the vast majority of those exposed to the virus — were obese.

Obese kids who had the antibody weighed on average about 50 pounds more than kids who didn't have it, and were an average of 35 pounds heavier than the other obese kids who tested negative for it. Additionally, the AD-36 antibodies occurred in much greater relative numbers in obese kids (15 of 67) than in non-obese kids (4 of 57), reports Science 2.0.

Time to celebrate? Not exactly. Before we conclude we've found the key to making us all slim and beautiful again, let's consider the possibility that those who are already obese are more vulnerable to contracting the virus. That vital cause-and-effect relationship hasn't been established.

Even so, it's hard not to suspect the researchers are on to something. The researchers themselves even put in their report that "This might be the mechanism for obesity..." They went on, however, to say "more work needs to be done." If they do more work and end up proving that causal link, the researchers wrote, "it would have considerable implications for the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity."

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