Brown Fat Boosts Weight Loss – Researchers have found that brown fat helps boost metabolism and burn more calories, but they aren’t sure if its a symptom or a cause.

Brown fat boosts weight loss

The discovery that adults retain small quantities of “brown fat”—which in infants burns calories to generate heat—has scientists exploring the possibility of using the substance as a weight-loss aid.

Brown fat is exceedingly effective at burning sugar, so researchers theorize that boosted amounts of the substance may increase a person’s metabolism so greatly that a 50 gram injection may help someone lose 10 pounds.

Healthy people tend to have more active brown fat than their less healthy, older or more overweight counterparts, said Dr. Aaron Cypess of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

But researchers are not sure whether the brown fat helped lead to better health or whether people in better health have more brown fat.

Further investigation will need to determine whether brown fat actually plays a protective role against obesity.

“First, we need to know the significance of brown fat function in human adults — we can look at how to increase brown fat — but first we need to understand it more,” said Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, a professor of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and a co-discoverer of brown fat in adults.

Recently, a team of researchers led by Dr. Bruce Spiegelman, a professor of cell biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, was able to increase brown fat stores in mice by turning immature muscle cells into brown fat cells, then transplanting these cells into adult mice.

Their findings were published in the research journal Nature.

The brown fat made by the research team was able to actively burn off incoming caloric energy, Spiegelman said.

Though the study did not demonstrate whether the animals lost weight, he said, the researchers’ next step will be to implant the engineered brown fat into obese mice to observe whether or not they get thinner.

And that’s the latest news on Brown Fat Boosts Weight Loss.

Tags: brown fat, brown fat weight loss, diet, weight loss

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