Monday, August 17, 2009
Fat determines who is skinny?
Posted
by Jonathan Bender on
Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 9:45 AM
click to enlarge
As our society grows, both in girth and population, the obsession with finding a cure for obesity has grown alongside it. While most solutions are thought to be found in products or surgery, scientists are looking inside the human body for part of the answer. In a recent editorial,
New Scientist looked at the potential weight loss benefits of
brown fat -- a heat-generating tissue that converts extra energy into heat.
Differences in the amount of brown fat each person has may help to explain why some of us are slim while others are overweight, and why many of us pile on the pounds as we age.
What we know as baby fat is, in many cases, brown fat. As it gets broken down by mitochondria, brown fat releases energy as heat. This process of heat generation, known as thermogenesis, helps babies stay warm. But as we get older the amount of brown fat decreases and until recently was thought to
disappear entirely because humans are more capable of regulating their temperatures without the fatty tissue.
Current research lacks a causal link, though. Although a
recent study in the
New England Journal of Medicine showed that thinner people tended to have more brown fat deposits than overweight or obese people, scientists don't know enough about brown fat as opposed to other variables in diet and exercise to say whether brown fat and someone's overall weight are connected.
The question now is how to translate these findings into a weight-loss strategy or product. Researchers are trying to determine if a weight-loss pill could be created that would either stimulate the production of brown fat or activate the tissue so it could begin consuming other fat cells.
It makes sense on some level that the possible solution to a fat epidemic in America would be more fat.
Tags: baby fat, brown fat, diet, weight loss
Comments (0)