Our study is one more piece of evidence that overweight and obesity do increase health risks, whether or not you have other risk factors. People need to pay attention and maintain a healthy body weight.

In any case, seeing care for certain groups as an excessive cost reflects an arguably perverse way of thinking about health care in terms of human need. [...] In other words, care for the sick is an economic burden only in health care systems where profit is the bottom line and public services are underfunded and politically unsupported - that is, systems in which only market logic is considered legitimate.

We have a public health problem of overweight and obesity, but it's been blown out of proportion, ... We focus on obesity and not on other health habits and other risk factors.

The continuing epidemic of obesity is a critical public health concern. As a nation, we need to respond as vigorously to this epidemic as we do to an infectious disease epidemic.

More research is needed to find out if Ad-37 causes obesity in humans. One study was inconclusive, because only a handful of people showed evidence of infection with Ad-37 - not enough people to draw any conclusions.

With so much attention focused on the health risks associated with overweight/obesity and advice from many health professionals focused on helping consumers achieve a better balance between energy consumption and expenditure, it will be interesting to see how consumer awareness and understanding of calorie information change over time.