Another Look At The Fat Virus
I’m not a fan of determinism. Especially when it comes to medicine. Partially this is because I’m just stupid and naive enough to think of medicine as a calling and not just a job. And I, personally, would only be happy if I never had to refill a prescription or even see a given patient ever again after 6 months. Of course, free will is also a crock when it comes to medicine. People are predisposed to certain conditions by dint of genetics, environment, and other factors. But predisposition and cause are two very different things, something many doctors either don’t understand or willfully ignore. Patients like it too. “It’s not my fault I’m diabetic, it’s genetic.” Certainly feels a lot better than “I should’ve paid more attention to lifestyle.
I’m sure most of my readers have heard about Ad36, an adenovirus similar to what causes the common cold. And they’ve heard about how it “makes” you fat. In a small study, they did find that 30% of obese people carried this virus, versus only 10% of others.
One thing I want to mention is that Ad36 causes paradoxical obesity. You’re fat, but you aren’t necessarily an unhealthy fat. You don’t necessarily have the high cholesterol, triglycerides and insulin problems.
But whenever someone throws percentages at me, I know that there’s another way to look at these things that can put it into a better, less alarmist/determinist, perpsective.
What they did was talk about the percentage of people of a given BMI category that are infected. But we could turn it around and look at the percentage of infected people that are obese. Roughly 30% of the country is obese, 70% not. When we compute everything out, we find that roughly 16% of the country is infected with Ad36. Of them, roughly 56% are obese, 44% not. For a virus that ’causes’ obesity, it sure seems to be kind of hit or miss.
You know, you picture makes you look kind of fat.
Comment by intellectimpure — September 14, 2006 @ 9:33 am
it’s my fat that makes me look fat lol.
Comment by IndianCowboy — September 14, 2006 @ 1:59 pm
I’ve always viewed my fat as a free insurance policy against the possibility of famine.
Comment by Mark — September 15, 2006 @ 3:24 am
Interview with Marston Alfred of SugarStats. Check it out:
http://techaddress.wordpress.com/2006/09/18/interview-with-marston-alfred-of-sugarstats/
We had the opportunity to speak with Marston Alfred, the founder of SugarStats.com. To say the least, they have some extremely exciting endeavors going on and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Mr. Alfred and learn more about SugarStats.
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