WEDNESDAY, April 8, 2009 (Health.com) — What if you had a special kind of fat in your body that burned calories instead of storing them—and it could be activated simply by spending time in the cold? According to three preliminary studies published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, you probably do.
Brown adipose tissue (called brown fat) helps babies, young children, and other small mammals stay warm by burning calories when activated by low temperatures. Scientists have been skeptical that adults retain significant amounts of brown fat on their bodies. But the new research shows that many of us—perhaps even most—do.
“The incredible excitement about this is that we have an entirely new way to try to go after obesity,” says Aaron Cypess, MD, of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, lead author of one of the new studies. Every obesity drug now on the market aims at getting people to take in fewer calories, Dr. Cypess points out. The current findings, while very preliminary, suggest that drugs could be developed that fire up brown fat activity and help people burn calories faster.
The new research is important because it confirms that adults have brown fat involved in temperature regulation, while also probably playing a role in whether a person is lean or overweight, says Jan Nedergaard, PhD, a professor at the Wenner-Gren Institute at the University of Stockholm in Sweden who has been studying brown fat for 30 years but was not involved in the current research.
“Brown fat can be a very significant player in the game of how we react to the food we eat and whether we store it or burn it away,” Dr. Nedergaard says.
While scientists have known about brown fat and what it does for decades, it’s been nearly impossible to study it in live humans until very recently. Finding it in people’s bodies meant taking tissue samples, so scientists mostly stuck to studying it in lab animals.
This changed when nuclear medicine specialists observed that some people had deposits of tissue that looked like fat but didn’t act like it; this fat-like tissue was located above the collarbones and in the upper chest and consumed lots of energy. Conversely, white adipose tissue—the regular fat that stores extra calories and makes us gain weight—shows very little metabolic activity.
Scientists began investigating whether this mystery tissue might be the elusive brown fat. In the new NEJM reports, three independent research teams have confirmed that this is the case, indeed, and that integrated positron-emission tomography and computed tomography (PET-CT) scans can be used not only to identify it but to measure its metabolic activity.
Next page: Who has the most brown fat?
Comments (11)
“Turn down the heat and burn calories”. Yeah, that’ll work — just as well as asking Americans in the 70’s to turn down the heat and wear a sweater to save energy.
The last 30 years have proven that Americans will not change behavior to solve their problems. The pattern is getting worse, not better.
Craig in Seattle
I just tested a product by Bodywell Nutrition called Top Secret. It targets triggering the brown fat and I had never heard of such a thing. Now that I read this article I understand what they were talking about. It worked for me.
It’s been known for decades that brown fat grows in adults exposed to colder environments. In fact, back in the 1970’s I went through a phase in which I jogged on cold winter days in order to alter the proportion of brown fat my body made based on the science media hype about it then.
The only new news I can detect here is the identification of some protein which may regulate that proportion. Practically though, it will probably (always) be a lot cheaper for most people to get more of it just by turning down the thermostat rather than invest in some expensive gene or protein therapy. And exercise is effective in reducing all fat, no matter what color it is, or the temperature outside.
>Craig End says:
>The last 30 years have proven that Americans will not change behavior to solve their problems
Generalize much?? How about recycling?? People predicted American’s would not recycle. Now almost all communities (at least in the east) have recycling programs and a lot of states have bottle bills that are well participated in. I remember as a kid seeing trash and bottles everywhere around streets and highways. You just don’t see that anymore. And what about what happened with gas prices last fall… Prices went up and so many people curtailed usage that the prices dived and inventories rose. Gas is just now getting back up to $2. Americans will change if it makes sense and they are properly incentivized.
Rob, I don’t think recycling solves someone’s personal problems. I think Craig is saying that in general, Americans are lazy at solving their personal problems.
I agree with Craig and Sophie.
For example: stop reading articles about increasing brown fat, stop eating garbage, and exercise from time to time. Those seem like behavioral changes that would solve health problems for millions of obese Americans. Not going to happen without some serious changes to how people think.
I think that most Americans are not lazy about solving problems, they are simply lazy about being informed on HOW to solve problems. They are also poorly informed about the existence of those problems. With all of the media hype about things that rarely amount to anything personally important, its no wonder Americans ignore most of what they hear and wait until it directly impacts their life before they believe what they hear and see in the media. With all the mis-information and slanted information at our finger tips its hard to know what to believe…making it hard to care about the same things.
This article is quite interesting and infact its very known in Sweden that even in the kindergardens we usually leave the kids sleeping in their buggies for like an hour or so in the cold in order for them to be capable of keeping their brown fat, what i was wondering if the brown fat proportions are somewhat the same in people born/bred in cold countries vs. those born/bred in hot environments. for example what if someone born in Africa and lived their childhood their, then they move to a cold country, would they have any brown fat left? or would have they lost it completely? can you reactivate it?
Guess we know why those Canadians are so skinny now, eh?
I am intriqued about Brown Fat; it is an corridor of Health awareness. I can sleep in a cold room, but walking around in a cold house is difficult, I am prone to arthitis; but I feel so refreshed upon waking up in the morning. Please More tips on the Brown fat.
brown fat for a healthy life.