Is Fat Contagious?

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine of more than 12,000 people found that obesity is socially contagious and can spread from person to person, much like a virus. The study shows that you have a 57 percent chance of becoming obese if you have a friend who is obese, and the risk rises to a 171 percent chance if two mutual friends become obese.

American scientists claim that a person can become overweight easily if he gets infected with the “Fat” virus, a virus that doubles the capacity to put on weight.

“Researchers believe that an airborne “adenovirus” germ could be causing the fat plague that is blighting Britain and other countries.

Adenovirus is a highly infectious virus. Adenovirus is a cold-like virus, also called AD-36. It causes coughs, sore throats, diarrhea and conjunctivitis. Scientists claim that this virus stimulates the fat cells to spread or multiply rapidly resulting in excessive weight gain.

As per scientists, apart from eating less and exercising regularly, it is very essential to wash hands to get rid of infectious viruses that can cause obesity.

Researcher Leah D. Whigham who led a study said, “Adipogenic potential of multiple human adenoviruses in vivo and in vitro in animals.”

The findings of the study were published by the American Physiological Society in the January issue of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.

Another study conducted on chickens by Whigham, Barbara A. Israel and Richard L. Atkinson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison too established that adenovirus Ad-37 was responsible for causing obesity in infected chickens. It was found in the study that Ad-36 and Ad-5 viruses make obesity contagious.

Specifically, Ad-36 virus causes obesity in humans but nothing can be said clearly about the effects of Ad-37 virus on humans, said Whigham. An in-depth research is required to explore how Ad-37 virus manipulates obesity in humans, he added.

Frank Greenway, professor in the Department of Clinical Trials, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, remarked, “If Ad-36 is responsible for a significant portion of human obesity, the logical therapeutic intervention would be to develop a vaccine to prevent future infections….If a vaccine were to be developed, one would want to ensure that all the serotypes of human adenoviruses responsible for human obesity were covered in the vaccine.”

Further research must be initiated soon to find out how, why and which viruses cause human obesity, to develop a diagnostic test to detect such an infection in humans and figure out an effective treatment like a vaccine to cure the obesity infection.