05 Jan Eight new and lazy ways to lose weight
The holidays are a time of excess. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet. Or perhaps not. Unfortunately, we don’t all have the self-discipline and determination it takes to cut back on cake and hit the gym. But fear not. There could be other ways to shift the fat and stay trim.
Just to get this straight, if you overeat and under-exercise you will gain weight. However, growing evidence suggests that other factors also contribute to excess adiposity.
Last year, David Allison at the University of Alabama at Birmingham highlighted this when he discovered that humans are not alone in piling on the pounds. He looked at wild animals, lab animals, even animals kept on the same highly controlled diets for decades, and found that all were becoming heavier (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 278, p 1626). Allison concludes that whatever factors are fattening up the animals that live around us might also help explain the human obesity epidemic.
That being the case, identifying these alternative factors should give us new ways to fight the bulge. The good news is that researchers worldwide are beginning to do just that. It is not yet known how much each factor contributes to obesity, but we can nevertheless suggest ways of avoiding them – and some are far less painful than dieting or pounding the tarmac.
Get vaccinated
If you catch a cold this holiday season you may have to stock up on new clothes as well as tissues. That’s because at least one common cold virus has been linked to obesity.
Nikhil Dhurandhar of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana discovered that adenovirus-36 (Ad-36) boosts both the number of fat cells in the body and the amount of fat inside these cells. He also found that obese people are nearly three times as likely as those of healthy weight to test positive for Ad-36 antibodies, indicating current or past infection (Obesity, vol 14, p 1905).
Another study reported that children with Ad-36 antibodies weighed an average of 23 kilograms more than children without them (Pediatrics, vol 126, p 721).
The “fat effect” of Ad-36 might persist for several years in humans, although nobody knows for sure. Meanwhile, another 10 microbes have been reported to make animals fatter. While it sounds alarming, this could actually be good news in the fight against flab. “If indeed some infections contribute to obesity in people, we could have a potentially very simple and effective prevention strategy – vaccination,” says Dhurandhar…..