We’ve heard obesity can be “spread” between friends when we copy each other’s eating habits, but a new study in mice suggests obesity could actually be infectious.
That’s right, infectious. As in, something you can catch.
In the study, mice engineered to have a particular immune deficiency developed fatty liver disease and got fatter when fed a Western-style diet. But strikingly, when these immune-deficient mice were put in the same cage as healthy mice, the healthy mice started to come down with symptoms of liver disease, and also got fatter.
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