THREE TRUTH OR DARE QUESTIONS ABOUT OBESITY DIETING EXERCISE AND WEIGHT GAIN AND IS BEING FAT INFECTIOUS DONT LET A FAT CHICKEN SNEEZE ON YOU

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A recent issue of Parade magazine has a story called "Surprising News About Weight Loss". It discusses three theories or myths about weight gain and weight loss that have been bubbling to the surface of the weight loss weight gain world lately. So truth or dare which of these ideas about fat, obesity and weight gain are true?



Can you catch weight gain and fat like a cold?



The first weight gain theory is that if your friends are fat there is an increased probability that you are overweight and or fat. The article says that a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine confirmed that people with friends who gain weight will also gain weight. That sounds logical since if there is greater acceptance of eating large amounts there is less social pressure to lose weight or be thinner. So true.







Number 2. Exercise won't help you lose weight because all that exercise makes you hungrier. No, regular exercise does help you lose weight. Regular exercise makes you healthier and is part of a successful weight loss plan along with diet. So false

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Weight Gain Myth 3. There is a virus that causes weight gain and in some cases obesity and fatness might be contagious like a cold. Maybe.
Researchers have found viruses like human adenovirus-36 that may transform stem cells into fat cells! At the University of Wisconsin, researchers found that chickens exposed to adenovirus 37 gained up to three times more weight in the gut than chickens that weren't exposed to the virus. Actually physiologist Leah Whigham of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues inoculated young male chickens with three strains of adenovirus Ad-2, Ad-31 and Ad-37. She and her team then monitored the chickens for three and a half weeks, recording their food intake throughout. Though the infected chickens and noninfected controls consumed the same amount of food and were exposed to the same conditions, chickens carrying Ad-37 were found to have nearly three times as much fat in their guts and more than two times as much fat over their entire body at the end of the three-and-a-half week period.



It's hard to say exactly what the lesson is from these studies. One lesson might be that if you are a chicken, try not to let other fat chickens sneeze on you! But virus Ad-36 has been shown in an in vitro study by researcher Nikhil Dhurandhar of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana to help human cells go from having the potential to store fat to actually storing it. "I am not saying that all obesity is caused by viruses," Dhurandhar notes. "Obesity has multiple causes and viruses may be one of those causes."

Study Strengthens Link between Virus and Weight Gain