brown fat

Kahn said he thinks ways will be found to increase brown fat in human beings "a lot, at least in activity if not in amount. "

At the moment, however, the only safe way of activating brown fat is to stay chilly, right at the verge of shivering, for prolonged periods.

Dr. Kozak says it's unclear how much cooler an environment needs to be to increase brown fat's activity level.

And while it's not clear how much brown fat would be needed to have an effect on body weight, he suspects that it wouldn't take much.

Another potential strategy might be to transplant brown fat cells into an overweight person to turn on the calorie-burning process.

The experiments did not test whether the extra brown fat actually protected the mice from becoming obese.

Newborn babies have brown fat -- presumably to help regulate their body temperature -- but adults are believed to have little.

They say that socialising and meeting with friends helps boost levels of 'brown fat' in the body which burns calories to generate heat.

The studies also found that brown fat was more common in women, younger patients and patients who were thin.

Another notable breakthrough involved research into brown fat tissue, which burns "bad" white fat to generate heat for the body.

Enerback and his team studied five patients and confirmed, using genetic analysis, that the cells around the neck were indeed brown fat.

But as we age our brown fat largely disappears and gets replaced by "bad" white fat, which typically sits as a spare tyre around the waist.

Now, Spiegelman and colleagues have identified two proteins that act as molecular "switches" to turn on the production of brown fat.

As people age, however, the body becomes more adept at regulating temperature, so brown fat stores shrink and white fat starts to emerge.

Brown adipose tissue, sometimes called "brown fat, " also plays a role by burning more energy in the form of heat in cooler temperatures.

Even when the brown fat was found in adults, it was believed to play no role in how the body stores and expends energy.

Brown fat, by contrast, works in an opposite fashion; it evolved to protect animals from cold conditions and prevent obesity.

The amount that comes off is far more than you would get with a treadmill. TIt's usually hard to induce the switch from white to brown fat.

Fat that keeps you lean sounds like a contradiction in terms, but that's what brown fat does.

During the test process, the brown fat could grow normally, thus avoiding the hormonal disorders of the mice.

Such experiments have revealed unexpectedly large amounts of brown fat scattered through the neck and chest areas.

Meanwhile, researchers in the Netherlands documented that lean young men have more brown fat than their overweight counterparts.

Still, the findings don't necessarily mean that activating brown fat leads to a trimmer waist.

Brown fat is actually the informal term used to refer to brown adipose tissue.

The hibernoma is a rare neoplasm derived from vestigial remnants of brown fat left from early embryologic development.

Now, researchers have figured out how to turn skin cells into brown fat that sucks up energy when transplanted into mice.

But unlike most cells, which take up glucose and turn it into chemical energy, brown fat sucks up glucose and generates heat instead.

Dr. Kozak has been investigating whether activation of brown fat can be increased through training people to better tolerate the cold.

But before we all turn our thermostats down or consider joining the Polar Bear Club, can brown fat actually cause weight loss?

Previously, scientists thought only small mammals and newborn babies harbored brown fat.

Heavier people appear to have less brown fat, while slim folks have more.

Unlike more recognizable white fat, which stores surplus energy, brown fat burns energy to generate heat.

Samples of tissue displayed the molecular signature of brown fat, including a key heat-producing protein that was absent from white fat.

Kahn's and van Marken Lichtenbelt's groups also found that heavier people tended to have less brown fat.

Then they underwent PET scans and CT scans to measure the location and metabolic activity of brown fat deposits.

Unlike white fat cells , which store energy from the food we eat, brown fat consumes calories to generate heat .

The scientists then transplanted the cells into mice, where they produced brown fat tissue.

The results bolster researchers' hopes of exploiting brown fat to control weight.

Like natural brown fat, the engineered cells burned calories at an astonishing rate.

Going forward, we will be looking for ways to manipulate the activity or amount of brown fat to treat obesity and obesity-related diseases.

But now, researchers have shown that the brown fat is present and working in adults.

"Ursolic acid ups muscle and brown fat, which boosts calorie burning, " says lead researcher Christopher Adams, MD.

Scientists have long thought that brown fat was present in young animals and human newborns but virtually absent in human adults.

And developing mice treated with BMP-7 ended up with more brown fat than untreated mice and had greater energy expenditures.

But under certain conditions, such as those mimicking a cold environment, these progenitor cells can be induced to make more brown fat.

In human beings, it is unclear whether brown fat is more a cause of leanness or a result of it.

As an dominant contor factor for the brown fat cell fate, PRDM16 had potential use in the treatment of obesity.

The one with no detectable brown fat was the most obese.

Scientists found that brown fat is remarkably similar to muscle, a discovery that could lead to new treatments for obesity.

In three, the tissue was then biopsied and proved to be brown fat.

Brown fat showed up as "hot spots" in the scans of 23 out of the 24 volunteers.

We have so little brown fat that researchers didn't even report its existence in adults until earlier this year.

And they found mice that developed extra brown fat tissue gained less weight than other mice, suggesting a potential use in weight loss.

In all three cases, the fibroblasts produced mature brown fat cells.

Other mammals and human infants rely on brown fat to keep warm.

"Adults do have brown fat, " Kahn says.

Because rodents have a lot of brown fat, it's very difficult to make them obese, even when you force-feed them in labs.

The research result shows that an adult mammalian body has not only white fat, but also a small amount of brown fat.

The study confirms that PRDM16 is the "master regulator" of brown fat creation.

The not-so-good news is that not all adults have brown fat.

For example, leaner people have more detectable brown fat than overweight people.

Effect of cold acclimation on GTP binding to uncoupling protein in mitochondria inner membrane of rat brown fat