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.