Hopeless Fat [Updated]

A young woman in good health caught a cold. She was a jogger, played tennis, biked and hiked with her boyfriend. In other words, she was more active physically than the average. But she caught a cold. Her eating habits were pretty much nominal American, some fast food, but not to excess. She was 5' 5" and weighed 130 pounds.

Five years later she is obese, weighing 187 pounds. When she started gaining weight, she increased her physical activities and cut out most of the fast food. At 153 pounds she started giving up. Jogging became too hard. She looked ridiculous on a bike. Her growing hunger drove her to less healthy foods.

All because she caught a cold. The specific cold virus she was unlucky enough to be infected by was adenovirus-36.

When America started porking up a few decades ago we started blaming our bad habits - with some justification. But TV, fast food, computer games, P.E. program cuts, et al aren't the entire problem, apparently. Check out this Science News article. The bottom line is that this cold virus twists some of your own stem cells into adipocytes - fat cells - and keeps producing them. There is no antidote, no cure for this. Once infected, you are on your way to obesity. Now that's depressing.

(Another non-bad-habit cause of obesity is mentioned below in the blog post of August 8 below: Polycarbonate plastic which we all use.)

There are jillions of cold viruses that won't make you fat, and even adenovirus-36 doesn't curse everyone it infects. But ... dang.

So:
1. Stay upwind of sneezers.
2. Wash your hands like surgeons do.
3. Don't go to work when you've got a cold.
4. Keep your immune system in fine tune.
5. Check out Sambucol from Israel (a silly personal suggestion).

And don't keep blaming every fat person you see for being a moral slacker. Maybe it wasn't her fault.

[UPDATE] You probably knew all about this, but I didn't until I heard Tom Hartman on Air America comment that there is a certain correlation between when Coke started using high fructose corn syrup as its sweetener (1985) and when America started getting fatter. Ah, the plot - and the waistlines - thicken!

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