Viruses May Be Fattening (Red Herring)
Comments(2) Six viruses have already been shown to produce obesity in animals, but University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists have now shown that a human virus can cause obesity in chickens, a strong suggestion that it could make people fat, too.
The findings, which implicated a type of adenovirus, were released by the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, which published the study.
[Because of its suggested origins as a virus, obesity may someday be cured with a vaccine, as this article indicates. I doubt that and I also doubt obesity is “catching” like a cold or a flu. How ridiculous are people going to get about this issue? Will we someday quarantine all people who are obese? I treat this topic as I do when my colleagues ask me how I do things outside of coursework (conferences, grants, publications). I say “Work harder and drink less” and that needs to be in a fortune cookie. BK]
category: Health
Well bob, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but it may be entirely plausible for viruses to increase body fat. In fact, it may be evolutionarily favorable. Viruses generally use the cell’s machinery to replicate and disperse. However, to use this machinery, it requires energy. The viruses may have evolved a protein or factor that increases fat generation and metabolism, providing the necessary energy to carry out the replication functions. I’m not saying that this is what happens, its just a hypothesis. If these scientists want to really show something, they should figure out the mechanism of reproduction of the virus, and see what kind of an effect it has on the cells.
The discussion here is exactly why our world cannot be ruled by humanities people alone. We are all scholars, but interestingly enough, humanities and sciences act as a “checks and balances” for one another. I would never have thought about cell replication with respect to viruses or viewed them as evolutionarily favorable.