#223 Ham-Buggler

It’s Herbie meets the Nutty Professor meets Big Mama—a crazy bug that makes you fat. Scientists have just proven that the scourge of obesity that is girdling the planet is most likely caused by a virus. That’s right, put away your oldies Richard Simons, the latest weapon in the anti-weight campaign is the face mask. All the precaution we take to prevent against food borne illness can now be used to prevent food borne fatness.
But first the science: University of Wisconsin scientists have shown that a human virus can cause obesity in chickens, a strong suggestion that it could cause fat in people too. What put the Wisconsonians—or Wisconsonites—on the track was the glaringly obvious in retrospect notion that obesity stands alone among chronic diseases in the rapidity of its “spread.” If you plot it on a graph the inflationary upward curve looks very much like an infectious disease epidemic. It’s broadening on a massive scale. Forget about global warming, global widening is the most dangerous trend of the new century. Rising cholesterol levels are far more a danger than rising seal levels. Icebergs calving and floating into the sea lanes are much less hazard that all the humongous sunbathers misguided Greenpeacers have rolled back into the ocean.
The scientific findings indicate the culprit as being an adenovirus. And no less an authority than the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology—which is like the People magazine of the scientific world—has weighed in with this comment: “The nearly simultaneous increase in the prevalence of obesity in most countries of the world is difficult to explain by changes in food intake and exercise alone, and suggests that adenoviruses could have contributed.” Wow that’s a mouthful.
About 60 million adults in the U.S. alone are defined as obese. Total cost of obesity to the U.S. economy is estimated at 78.5 billion. Oddly, total junkfood sales are about 100 billion. So net-net we still tap the scale on the half-full side of the optimistic equation.
The Wisconsin researchers are toying with the idea of a vaccine. I’m pretty sure if they come up with one, there’ll be a lot of skinnier people out there that would love to buy more cheese. In the meantime, here are some basic cautionary steps from the food handlers manual that all young restaurant workers are supposed to pass a test on: Wash your hand frequently. Don’t sneeze into the salad bar and after washing, scrub your hands vigorously with a paper towel before returning to the food preparation area. Wouldn’t it be funny if McDonalds was blamed for all these years for making people fat when in fact it was their poorly-trained and poorly-hygiened teenage help that was spreading the Mc-fat germ. Two all beef patties special sauce ketchup pickles lettuce onion on a virus flecked bun. Supersize me indeed.
America, ya gotta love it.