Brown Fat May Help You Lose Weight

By Kat Ahn on April 9th, 2009

• Share
• Link to StumbleUpon
• 2 Comments

Brown Fat. Two words that do not bring up pretty images.  This type of fat or brown adipose tissue, that until recently was thought to exist only with newborns.  But three new studies from Boston, Finland and the Netherlands, published in the New England Journal of Medicine show that more than half of adult men and women have enough brown fat in their bodies to burn off a large portion of white fat.

It just needs to be activated.  What does this mean, exactly? Well, brown fat is the good fat which is stored around the neck and collarbone while white fat tends to concentrate around the waistline.  And brown fat becomes stimulated when you’re cold, thus burning white fat as fuel, which enables weight loss.

In a recent MSNBC article, Dr. Louis Aronne, former president of the Obesity Society and a weight control expert at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, says “I don’t want to use the word ‘exercise-in-a-pill,’ but it’s doing something (that’s) getting rid of calories.”

As Scientists learn more about brown fat and how to activate its properties, there are most likely pharmaceutical companies that are hopeful at the thought of finding how to increase the activation of brown fat.  And so are the population of obese people who are unable to lose weight even with diet and exercise.

This story should stay in the headlines for days to come.