Scientists around the globe are busily investigating the qualities of a secondary type of fat that many of us carry in addition to the white fat cells most of us know all too well.
It’s called brown fat and there is a growing body of evidence that suggests this not-so-fashionable fat may in fact be responsible for helping to regulate the human body burn energy in the cold boosting your metabolism, and may, therefore, be useful in helping people lose weight.
While scientists are only at the beginning of understanding how this type of fat works, recent research suggests that exposure to colder temperatures turns on the energy-burning abilities of brown fat – it produces 300 times more heat per gram than any other tissue in the body – and the good news is that you may only need to stay cool at around 16 degrees C , not freezing to death.
And there may be another way to turn on this remarkable feature – Capsaicin, the chemical compound that puts the hot stuff into chilli. In several preliminary studies people who took capsaicin pills daily had greater brown fat activity in the cold and burned more kilojoules during a six week trial.
But the bad news is that it seems obese people have low amounts of brown fat and slim people have higher amounts, which may help explain why some can eat what they want and stay thin and others…well, you know. Even worse, brown fat decreases as we get older.
But in 2012 scientists at the Harvard Medical School discovered yet another type of fat – beige fat – which may perform a similar function to brown fat because it contains the same key protein molecule thermogenin (UCP1) that burns energy.
Studies with rodents show that by decreasing temperatures white fat can be turned into beige fat. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. The change may also require particular hormones produced by the body and this is still being investigated.
The hope is that instead of being perpetually cold, medical researchers might be able to discover a drug that turns on the heat-producing energy burner inside us.
Until then, there is always that little black dress.
