Brown Fat Helps Battle Obesity: Study

Jacksonville – Do you like to be really COLD? Would you consider being kept at 61* for at least two hours in order to increase your “brown fat” which could help weight loss because of burning away the fat rather than store it?

Three new studies have just come out in the New England Journal of Medicine, each of which is different from the others but indicate the same results: that this brown fat still exists in the bodies of adults and can be activated.

Brown fat is above the collarbone and in the upper chest and appears more in younger lean people than in older obese ones or those who have diabetes or use beta blockers. Also, brown fat appears more in women than in men.

“The incredible excitement about this is that we have an entirely new way to try to go after obesity,” said Dr. Aaron Cypess of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, Massachusetts, the lead author of one of the new studies.

Some of the volunteers in the studies were exposed to the low 60′s temperatures, and others even had a foot put into ice water! PET-CT scans were then taken, which made any tissue using a lot of glucose light up in most of the subjects.

Will a pill eventually be developed to make the brown fat do its work?

“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 three studies appearing today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“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.

Conversely, since only about 500 calories is burned, one researcher does not think that being out in the cold is going to fight obesity. Another feels that we would rather be warm than fight the cold in order to lose perhaps only 10 pounds in a year if the brown fat is fully stimulated. Several still think that the true answer continues to be more exercise and eating healthy.

Obesity in the United States has significantly risen in the past 20 years. Over 60 million adults and 9 million children are obese.