There is a lot of buzz in the news today about brown fat. So what is brown fat and how does it help with weight loss?
Three new studies appearing today in the New England Journal of Medicine show that brown fat in humans has the potential to fight obesity.
“It is, in a sense, the discovery of a new organ,” said Sven Enerback, a researcher at the University of Goteborg in Sweden and the lead author of one of the studies.
“This is a tissue whose sole physiological purpose is to expend energy,” said Francesco S. Celi, a metabolism researcher at the National Institutes of Health, whose commentary accompanies the studies. “That makes it an ideal target” for drugs or other measures designed to make it more active.
Currently, the only way to stimulate the production of brown fat is to stay cold — near shivering, for extended periods of time, reproducing the conditions that led to it’s evolution.
While researchers are looking at more comfortable ways to activate brown fat, don’t turn down your thermostats expecting quick results just yet. According to the studies, brown fat “might” be able to burn off 10 pounds of fat in a year when fully stimulated.