Did you know that fat comes in two distinct, if unimaginative, colors – white which offers insulation and stores extra energy, and brown adipose tissue which burns energy to produce heat?
Brown fat (as much as 5% of their body weight) helps keep newborns warm, but no one knew how much adults retain, or how active it might be.
Some thought adults had none of this “good” fat; others were convinced that it had no connection to extra weight or obesity. The latest research in this area changes all that.
Studies have been going on for decades looking at brown fat (known to science as brown adipose tissue) in the hope of finding ways to unlock its secrets.
Now a trio of reports appearing in the April 9, 2009 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) confirm finding brown fat in adults, and that it can be detected by exposing subjects to cold temperatures.
Most of us have small deposits of this fat around our collarbones and in the neck area, with women having two times as much (estimated to be about a half ounce) on average, then men do.
In some cases, those who had more active areas of brown fat were not as heavy… leaving experts to wonder at the working of this type of fat.
“Fifty grams of maximally activated brown fat accounts for 20 percent of your resting energy expenditure,” explains Dr. Aaron Cypress of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, who led one of the studies. “If you add that up, that’s 400 or 500 calories per day. So maybe a little of this good fat could go a long way.
In a second study, Finnish researcher Dr. Kirsi Virtanen of the University of Turku and colleagues used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to locate active brown fat deposits in healthy volunteers.
The brown fat became more active when the subjects were left in a chilly room for several hours. Experts found that this fat, unlike the white kind, burns calories faster in colder temperatures.
In the study, the metabolism was an average 15 times higher than in the area where the white fat cells reside.
Could brown fat play a role in our metabolism also?
A third work, also appearing in the same issue of the NEJM, conducted by a team at Maastricht University Medical Center found that obese men had less brown fat than subjects who were leaner.
They also found that people have less brown fat as they age, and that spending even a small amount of time in a chilly place can activate this type of fat.
These studies show that adults do have functional brown fat in our bodies. Though no one knows what role brown fat might play in weight loss in the future, researchers are hoping for big things.
Continues below…
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Brown Fat Burns Calories Faster; Activated By Cold continued…
Maybe research will uncover a way to help the body produce more brown fat; or just activate the potentially good fat cells we have now. Perhaps a drug could target some parts of brown fats metabolic mechanisms, perhaps a procedure could remove the brown fat, amplify it somehow and return it to the body.
Cypress sees activation as key, though whether this would make people lose weight has yet to be tested.
Who knows if turning on this type of fat might just not make the body want to eat more?
If you’d like to try and activate your own stores of brown adipose tissue, turn down the thermostat, or spend more time outdoors in a cooler climate. Temperatures of 61 degrees were used on the research subjects, and might be enough to have your own heat generating, fat burning engine humming along in no time.
To your good health,
Kirsten Whittaker
Daily Health Bulletin Editor
