Is Brown Fat Good for You?By Peter Liu [Weight Loss]
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How does brown fat differ from the white fat we’re used to hearing about? Peter Liu holds his pencil crayons ready.  When we hear the word fat, a million negative connotations can spring up instantly leaving behind the instances where fat can mean a good thing. Fat can mean something positive. After all, healthy fats like fish oils, the always talked about omega-3 fats or healthy cooking oils do exist. But is there a different type of fat in our very bodies that can be dubbed a good fat? In fact there is. Meet twin brother to the white fats we are used to seeing: the brown fat. This type of brown fat is said to help counter obesity-related conditions by focusing on the calorie-burning abilities it can exhibit. Will brown fat become another new method of treating the spread of obesity?The Spread of Brown Fat Body fat comes in two types: white fat and brown fat. White fat stores extra calories away as fat to be burned up later as energy, while brown fat readily burns calories faster since its primary function is to produce body heat. Usually present in large amounts during infancy to regulate body temperature, brown fat is virtually nonexistent in adults. With much larger amounts of mitochondria per cell than in white fat, brown fat can aid in weight loss solutions and work with the extra stored white fat in the body. Brown Fat Triggers With such promising potential from brown fat, researchers in the United States are looking at ways to synthesize brown fat with promising results. Two separate studies published in the British medical journal Nature looked at different ways to produce brown fat in mice to much success. The first study, led by Bruce Spiegelman at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Massachusetts, discovered a crucial link between brown fat and muscle. Spiegelman and his team found that brown fat cells can be created from young muscle tissue that usually produces muscle cells. A specific protein named PRDM16 was isolated as the genetic key that activated the brown fat creation process. Higher levels of PRDM16 would produce brown fat, while lower levels would produce muscle. Isolating the molecular switch led the team to discover that brown fat and white fat come from completely different places since brown fat originates from muscle tissue. In the second study, a research team led by Yu-Hua Tseng at the Joslin Diabetes Centre at Harvard Medical School looked at methods of increasing amounts of brown fat. Their research focused on factors that determined amounts of different fat types in the body while searching for methods applicable for obesity treatment. The team isolated a protein usually reserved for inducing bone growth named BMP-7 to stimulate production of brown fat in lab mice. BMP-7 (Bone Morphogenetic Protein-7) compels precursor cells to produce mature brown fat cells, while leaving normal white fat cells intact. The researchers artificially injected the mice with a modified cold virus treated with BMP-7, infecting cells to increase brown fat production and resulting in leaner mice. Tseng’s team also experimented with young fat cells, discovering that the immature fat cells produced high amounts of BMP-7 in mice, before maturing into brown fat. Tseng intends for brown fat to work with white fat in the body to combat obesity. Since white fat stores excess calories, they can be passed onto the brown fat where it will be used up. |
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