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Did you know catching this common human virus can make you fat?
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Photo Credit/DB Techno
We all know that stuffing our faces with pizza and donuts while sitting on our ass watching Oprah ever day will definitely make us extra fluffy and may even have the neighborhood kids mistake us for a ride at Disney. But did you know that catching a virus can literally pack on the pounds without even giving you the pleasure of devouring those Little Debbie Snack Cakes?
Catching "being fat" by means of this virus has been called Infectobesity by Professor Nikhil Dhurandhar, a professor at Louisiana State University. What virus is this exactly? It's called Adenovirus-36, otherwise known as Ad-36. This particular strain of 50 Adenoviruses which are responsible for respiratory infections, eye infections and colds was first linked to weight gain when Dhurandhar noticed that chickens infected with Ad-36 became plump instead of wasting away with disease. He found that when both chickens and mice were injected with Ad-36 they became much fatter than those that weren't injected and fed the same exact foods. Surprisingly, though, these fat mice and chickens had low levels of cholesterol and fatty acids in their bloodstream, which is quite the opposite with normal obesity. The viruses infect fat cells over muscle cells and can be detected up to 16 weeks after infection.
Dhurandhar took his findings to the human population and found that nearly 30 percent of obese people had antibodies (an indicator of exposure) to Ad-36. Where as only 5 percent of non-obese people had them. Just like with the animal study, the humans also had low levels of cholesterol and fatty acids in their bloodstream, while the other obese people without evidence of infection did not share this profile. It's unclear, however, from his study whether this infection preceded obesity or came afterward.
In vitro research has shown that the virus can increase how much fat a cell holds and can predispose cells to become pre-fat cells.
More research needs to be done on Ad-36 to see how it reacts on a human population. Not everyone infected with Ad-36 becomes obese and not every obese person is infected with Ad-36.
I never thought I would see the day where like cooties, we could catch "being fat", how crazy is that? Hmm, I wonder if you can catch being ugly.......just sayin'.
Until next time..................
For more information on how you can get fat from bacteria and plastic http://climate.weather.com/articles/dcplastics2009.html?from=pif_locallinker_undeclared
Source/Credit
DivineCaroline.com
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