Just when you thought you’ve heard everything there is to know about fat, there comes what’s referred to as brown fat. But, scientists have known about brown fat for decades, and may actually help you lose weight.
Brown fat helps keep newborns warm, and while it was known to exist in adults, it’s more prevalent in adults than previously thought. The importance to this finding is that brown fat burns calories faster than regular fat.
Researchers reported in three studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine that they found brown fat in most adults. They found that they can detect it by exposing people to cold. In some cases, adults who had more active areas of brown fat were thinner.
“Fifty grams of maximally activated brown fat accounts for 20 percent of your resting energy expenditure,” say lead researcher Dr. Aaron Cypress of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. “If you add that up, that’s 400 or 500 calories per day.”
In a separate but supportive study in the Netherlands, a team at Maastricht University Medical Center found that obese men have less brown fat that lean men.
Now the tough part: scientists have to find a way to activate the brown fat. There are other uncertainties as well, including whether that would even do the job. But at least there’s hope for positive findings in the future.
“Using brown fat to treat obesity has been talked about for 30 or 40 years,” he said. “But people essentially gave up on it. Many said it didn’t exist in adult human beings and many said it didn’t have any connection to obesity and weight at all. What these studies show is that virtually every adult human being has functional brown fat in them.
(via: Yahoo)
