I stopped there, because that’s more than enough: being infected with AD-36 makes you fatter, proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Any commenters nitpicking the statistics and sample sizes of individual studies are missing the point, because the evidence is the sum of all the studies [emphasis added], and they are not all flawed, or at least not flawed badly enough to seriously undermine the conclusion.
You are the first person to actually take a firm position. I am enough of a Popper fan to applaud you, even if you end up being proven wrong. Thx.
I’m still unconvinced/neutral myself, but for the sake of argument I’ll make a few criticisms of your conclusions. I wonder how you will respond.
To begin, if you are going to sum all of the studies, you should probably include the negative ones, such as this European study or this US military study. It seems to me that rationality requires that the negative evidence somehow be explained away before the positive evidence is taken at face value. I have trouble explaining away the European study, though, of course, it might be argued that a different substrain of the virus is endemic on the European continent.
Another reason for uneasiness is the fact that the positive research is coming from so few research groups, and that the leaders of some of those groups have applied for a patent—as you yourself pointed out.
And finally, maybe it shouldn’t, but the fact that the most recent study presented such patently misleading statistics gives me a bad feeling about the whole hypothesis.
I actually missed those two negative studies—I only went through the first few pages of Google Scholar and PubMed results; I guess I should’ve been looking more closely at the preexisting discussion here. My confidence is lowered. Now for those two studies themselves -
The European one has a line in the abstract that seems to explain it: “No adenoviral DNA could be found using PCR on visceral adipose tissue.” That suggests either a significantly different strain or a significantly different (and better) immune response. I haven’t read the text of the military study (that one costs money), but the most likely confounding factor there would be military recruitment filtering out a lot of obese people; the child exposure test weakly suggests that the effect is largest on children whose adipose tissues are still growing, while the obese in the military are probably mostly those who started out fit and gained weight as they aged.
You are the first person to actually take a firm position. I am enough of a Popper fan to applaud you, even if you end up being proven wrong. Thx.
I’m still unconvinced/neutral myself, but for the sake of argument I’ll make a few criticisms of your conclusions. I wonder how you will respond.
To begin, if you are going to sum all of the studies, you should probably include the negative ones, such as this European study or this US military study. It seems to me that rationality requires that the negative evidence somehow be explained away before the positive evidence is taken at face value. I have trouble explaining away the European study, though, of course, it might be argued that a different substrain of the virus is endemic on the European continent.
Another reason for uneasiness is the fact that the positive research is coming from so few research groups, and that the leaders of some of those groups have applied for a patent—as you yourself pointed out.
And finally, maybe it shouldn’t, but the fact that the most recent study presented such patently misleading statistics gives me a bad feeling about the whole hypothesis.
I actually missed those two negative studies—I only went through the first few pages of Google Scholar and PubMed results; I guess I should’ve been looking more closely at the preexisting discussion here. My confidence is lowered. Now for those two studies themselves -
The European one has a line in the abstract that seems to explain it: “No adenoviral DNA could be found using PCR on visceral adipose tissue.” That suggests either a significantly different strain or a significantly different (and better) immune response. I haven’t read the text of the military study (that one costs money), but the most likely confounding factor there would be military recruitment filtering out a lot of obese people; the child exposure test weakly suggests that the effect is largest on children whose adipose tissues are still growing, while the obese in the military are probably mostly those who started out fit and gained weight as they aged.
I have the text of the military study if you want to PM an email address.