What If Obesity Is Nobody's Fault

[Warpy]

1. I've been saying this for years

but I guess a lot of people out there need people to look down on and blame, "for their own good," of course.

There was a study done a couple of years ago on adenovirus serotype 36 in children. They found that all the kids who tested positive were obese and that the deviation from the normal weight was fifty pounds. There were kids who were obese but not positive for the virus but the correlation was incredibly strong for an infectious cause of extreme weight gain, and 50 pounds in a kid is extreme.

If they keep following up on this one and looking for other infectious agents that either attack healthy gut bacteria (eg bacteriophages) or reprogram the cells, themselves (like the adenovirus 36), we might eventually see a vaccine against obesity and the end of the obesity epidemic.

And it does follow the classic pattern of a contagious epidemic, starting near the Gulf of Mexico and traveling out from there. Mexico has just passed us in obesity rates and the pattern is the same there. And there is no way you can tell me Mexicans are couch potatoes who live on fast food.