The spread of obesity in America coincidental? Fat chance
by Beth Teitell

Tuesday, February 20, 2001

I don't know if you've heard, but scientists have discovered that obesity may be contagious.

``Oh my God!'' a friend said when I told her the news. ``I just came back from the mall!''

She hung up and ran to the shower, calling back after an hour or so.

``Do they know how long the virus lives outside the body?'' she asked, panicky.

I do know that a cold virus can live for up to three hours outside the body, and that jeans can get tight after one bite of a Milky Way, but I'm not sure what the deal is with the fat virus, although I'd guess its life span is measured in decades, which would explain why I have my grandmother's thighs.

Another unanswered question: Where did the virus start? Are scientists searching for a Fattie Zero? Will they someday be able to trace America's obesity epidemic to a whale in Billerica? Or did it migrate here from Central Europe and spread like wildfire in the Mall of America?

What I do know for certain is this: Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that mice and chickens infected with a common human virus - adenovirus-36 - put on much more fat than uninfected animals.

Researchers spritzed the virus up the animals' noses, and after just three weeks 70 percent of the animals became obese, their average abdominal fat more than doubling. The animals' appetites stayed the same, so it appears the virus slowed their metabolism. (Talk about unfair. At least if you're going to gain weight, even if you're a chicken or a mouse, you should have some fun doing it.)

Even though I just read about this frightening research, it turns out that the results were reported last August in the International Journal of Obesity, but got relatively little attention.

Why, you may ask yourself, do I know that Richard Hatch had liposuction - something that has no impact on anyone's life except for Richard's - yet was unaware of this very important medical news?

The diet-industrial complex, that's why. They want you to be fat, so they squash news like this.

Shape magazine, for example, has a story this month called ``How America is making you fat.'' I assumed it would be about the virus, but no. The magazine instead pretends the research was never done.

``If being overweight were an infectious disease,'' the director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado told the magazine, ``we would have mobilized the country. We would have declared a state of emergency.''

Hellooo! If?

The story offers tips on working more exercise into your day, among them this: ``Don't drive-thru. Get out of the car and walk inside to get food.''

Oh, that's smart. While you're at it, why not walk into a day care center to fight off that cold you feel coming on?

As you can imagine, the news that you can catch fat has thrown many hard-core dieters into a tizzy. A well-known trick among this crowd has been to hang out with heavier people, thereby making yourself look slimmer.

``There are pictures of me with my mother-in-law and her friends at the Catskills,'' a friend told me, ``and I look like a starlet.''

She used to love looking at those photos, but no more. Like the bacon and egg breakfast, and O.J., they seem much more ominous than they used to.