ACS Boston August 2007: Katharine the gourmand
I have just worked out that, since saturday afternoon, all my meals have been sandwiches for one reason or another, although I almost ate a slice of cold pizza at one point, but didn't want cheese-related nightmares so declined. I have broken the cycle now thanks to a chocolate croissant in the press room.
My mind turns to food because a major thread of this conference is the genomics of obesity. In particular i was interested to learn that human adenovirus-36, known to be the "obesity virus", has now been shown to turn stem cells into fat cells. Magdalena Pasarica at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Nikhil Dhurandhar from Louisiana State university, took stem cells from the fatty tissue from a bunch of liposuction patients. Half of the batch of stem cells were exposed to Ad-36, and half not. The virus-infected stem cells developed into fat cells.
So does this mean, as long as i don't get the virus, that i can happily eat my chocoate croissants without worry of becoming obese? Or am i missing the point?
Comments
are you kidding!?!?! the fact that america consumes more food than other country and we are placing fast food joints in our school systems, there is a dairy queen or two in each major city, and where I live there are more fast food joints than I care to count; that could be the problem not a "fat virus" this is just another attempt to cover up the fact that we as nation are obese. It bothers me that at one time I weighed over 400 lbs and now I weigh 1/2 of that and believe me I wish it could have been a stupid virus and not my own stupidness and food choices. Now the weightloss industry(pills, weightloss surgery, infomercials, and the rest of them) are going to make the price of the whole deal explode.
Posted by: teresa | August 22, 2007 02:24 PM