Man!

I take one day off from blogging, and what happens? Every media outlet in the universe covers a new study that suggests some obesity may be caused by a common virus.

Here's a snippet from the Reuters story:

Dr. Dhurandhar has been on the trail of what he calls "infectobesity" for years. He published this study in the Journal of Nutrition in 2001, explaining all the viruses, animal and human, that have been associated with obesity. (Canine distemper virus, for example, made Swiss albino mice fat in one experiment. Why it occurred to anyone to inject a dog virus into albino mice is a question for another day.)

The most remarkable of them all is the human virus, Ad-36. In four experiments -- three with chickens, one with mice -- it induced obesity in about two-thirds of the animals. In humans, 30 percent of obese people tested in one study showed signs of Ad-36 antibodies, suggesting they'd been infected by that virus at some point. Conversely, just 5 percent of nonobese people had the antibodies.

But it gets even more intriguing than that:

In animal studies, the chickens and mice infected with Ad-36 get fatter, but at the same time achieve lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels. And sure enough, the obese humans who have Ad-36 antibodies have lower blood lipids than you'd expect.

Toward the end of the Reuters interview, Dr. Dhurandhar offers some perspective:

Which brings me back to the original question, posed in my headline: Can you catch obesity? Yes, but you need a really big mitt.

Monday blog meat

• Women often lose weight 10 years before developing dementia, an average of about 12 pounds, according to a new study. But for men, losing weight doesn't seem to have any link to losing your marbles.
• Another odd man-woman thing: Women who drink three cups of coffee or tea a day stay sharper in old age than women who don't. But for men, caffeine doesn't seem to have any influence on mental acuity.
• Obese kids are more likely to miss days of school. Underweight kids have the fewest absences. But the effect seems pretty small; fewer than five absences per school year separate the underweight and the obese, and there's no evidence it affects academic performance.