Beware! You could catch fat
Avirook Sen
(www.hindustantimes.com)
There’s something tiny out there that could be out to get you. Get you fat. Forget bad diets. Forget bad habits (like watching TV when you should be exercising). The fact that you’re obese could simply be the result of bad luck.
According to Nikhil Dhurandhar, an expatriate Indian scientist working in the United States, the “obesity bug” is a virus that belongs to the adenovirus family. In theory, you could catch it the same way as you catch a cold: someone sneezes and you’re around.
Sure that he would not get funding to support research for such a bizarre proposition, Dhurandahar left for the US in 1988. He tied up with Richard Atkinson, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has resulted in what could turn out to be pathbreaking research in the ample field of obesity. The two have published their findings in this month’s International Journal of Obesity.
According to the New Scientist, which has run a cover story on the obesity bug, the idea that a virus may be responsible for excess weight first struck Dhurandhar when a veterinary doctor friend told him that hundreds of chickens were dying of a viral infection. But strangely, they hardly looked debilitated. In fact, Dhurandhar found the birds resembled fowl being fattened for Christmas.
Dhurandhar’s experiments with chickens injected with the SMAM-1 virus (one of the obesity bugs) showed that the chickens gained weight far faster than normal. But there was another surprise: these chickens had far lower levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, molecules carrying fat around the body in the bloodstream, that are usually abundant in fat people.
Once he was in America working with Atkinson, Dhurandhar wanted to import the SMAM-1 virus. The Americans (faced with a situation out of X-files) refused permission. (Why place a population in which almost every fourth person is obese at further risk?)
But Dhurandhar and Atkinson found a clone in another virus of the same family: the AD-36. They tried the experiment on mice. And now they’ve conducted tests on Marmosets (a type of monkey) and come up with the same results. Atkinson told the New Scientist: People can dismiss chickens…They can dismiss mice…It’s a lot harder to dismiss monkeys.”
Among a group of 313 obese people that the researchers studied, they found about a third had been exposed to AD-36 at some stage. The clincher was that the virus had also left its mark by lowering cholesterol levels in these people.
The next step is to work out an anti-viral vaccine for obesity-a project that Dhurandhar has already started. Interestingly, the virus is carried around more by thin people than by the obese. The monkeys in Dhurandhar’s experiment didn’t have traces of the virus once they were fat. So the next time you’re sharing a seat with an obese person know that you are safe. And that they didn’t just have junk food. They could just have contracted a virus.