Heard about this website from my g/f yesterday, who heard about it on her local news - http://www.obesityvirus.com/.
Anyone have any information from known reputable sources to either confirm or question this theory?
AFAIK, it’s a virus that is present in many obese people and not present in thinner people. Whether or not there is any causation remains to be seen.
All info is preliminary at this point.
Here is a good study. I think its the same study repeated endlessly in all of the articles on it.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/07/28/fat.virus.ap/
In four experiments, the Wisconsin researchers inoculated chickens and mice with adenovirus-36, a member of a viral family that includes about 50 strains. Most adenoviruses cause colds, diarrhea or pinkeye.
After several months, animals infected with adenovirus-36 weighed only 7 percent more on average than those without the virus, but their bodies contained more than twice as much fat…Unpublished studies in humans show that 20 to 30 percent of overweight people are infected with adenovirus-36, compared to about 5 percent of the lean population.
Oh man…so it’s not the steak salads, toasted sourdough, and veggie lasagna! That a relief! Where’s my pill?
Its scientific progress I tells ya.
Correlation’s not causation, and we are not chickens or mice. Don’t jump to any conclusions from this just yet.
Oh, but jumping to conclusions is such great exercise. I’ll have some of that anti-viral med, please, a vaccine, and while you’re at it, pass the chocolate.
MORE POWDERED DONUT FRENCH TOAST PLEASE!
I need something to wash this anti-fat pill down too…hand me that bottle of syrup while you’re up! 
Seriously you guys, as someone who has battled excess weight for a lifetime I can assure you it’s not all gluttony.
People who are fat are fat because they eat more calories than they burn, ok; but why? Because they’re lazy and gluttonous? Maybe - or maybe they’re hungry all the time. Maybe they are chronically fatigued and can’t expend as much energy as normal people. Maybe every ounce of food they swallow gets immediately converted directly into fat, leaving nothing for energy or building muscle mass.
Let me put it this way: bad habits will make you 30-50 pounds overweight. If you’re 100 pounds overweight, something is desperately wrong. If you had to make yourself overweight - if you could win a million dollars in a contest if you gained 100 pounds in a year - a normal person probably couldn’t do it, no matter how hard they tried. They couldn’t eat that much without getting sick. Whereas a fat person effortlessly eats two or three times as much as normal, and couldn’t not do so without making themselves weak and sick.
And just because someone is overweight doesn’t mean that losing weight means going back to “normal”. Even if you’re double what your ideal weight should be, your body still thinks that’s what weight it’s supposed to be, and reacts badly to rapid weight loss. Suppose for another example that you had to lose thirty pounds: lean, but not dangerously so for an average adult male. I guarantee you that a regimine of diet and excercise sufficient to cut thirty pounds of fat off you would feel like a death march. And that’s for a “normal” person! How much harder is it for someone who may truly have something metabolically wrong with them? And yet for many a thirty pound loss would simply make them somewhat less overweight than they were before! The miracle is that anyone does ever lose large amounts of weight, not that so many fail to.
So I can well believe that a chronic viral infection could be a hidden cause of some (not all!) obesity.
It is the best excuse (cause), real or imaginary, I’ve heard of to date!
If it’s for real it will hit the news if not forget it.
I checked PubMed for this and wasn’t too surprised to see that all the studies purporting to show this association are from the same group of researchers. And, wouldn’t you know it - Dr. R. Atkinson himself, the president of Obetech, is a member of that group.
This research group itself has published only one paper in the last two years, hardly an impressive output. More importantly, no other group, despite having had all that time, has sought to pursue, confirm, or disprove the results.
All in all, makes me very, very suspicious.
When I first read this, because you described it as obesityvirus.com, I thought you were talking about a computer virus. And that your OP was therefore one of the dumbest I’d heard of for a long time 
100 pounds in a year=approximately two pounds a week. That’s taking in about 7,000 calories in a week more than what’s expended. 1,000 calories a day is four candy bars. I think most people could eat what they normally eat plus four candy bars without making themselves sick.
This is off topic but I don’t really agree. 1000 calories a day is not a huge deal in my view. People can eat hugely varied diets based on how much time they have to eat, stress and how much physical activity they do.
Besides, the assumption that 100% of excess calories become fat is not true. I am too lazy to dig up the cites (I can if people need them) but from the stud(ies) I have read on overfeeding about 30-80% of excess calories becomes fat. The rest is either burned off or becomes muscle to carry the extra fat around. So a person may need to eat 2000 calories a day to gain 2 lbs a week.
And i’ve lost about 50 lbs and it was largely effortless. The ‘next’ 30 lbs is alot harder though, it depends on the person. Some peopel struggle and lose nothing and some (like I used to do) just make mild dietary and lifestyle changes and end up losing 10" on their waists.