What is Brown Fat and its Role in Weight Loss?
As the name implies, brown fat is fat that’s brown. All of our bodies have some white fat, but brown adipose tissue has more mitochondria. Unlike white adipose tissue—your regular everyday run-of-the-mill fat—that serves as an insulator for your body and doesn’t do much else,
brown adipose tissue helps the body generate heat by burning calories at a faster rate. It also plays a critical role in regulating metabolism and blood sugar levels. For these reasons, many think brown adipose tissue could be highly beneficial for weight loss.
The History of Brown Fat Research
For millennia people thought that only animals could produce their body heat; they were considered too “civilized” for it, while animals like bears and penguins were either hailed as the pinnacle of human physical ability or hunted into extinction.
However, in 2009 a research paper on an old Inuit woman proved that brown fat was present in humans and played a key role in temperature regulation. Since then, its presence has been confirmed by modern technology such as MRI scans, which have found large deposits of brown adipose tissue in adult humans’ necks and upper fronts.
This is especially interesting because it’s often thought to be children who have the most abundant amounts of brown adipose tissue due to their young age. It seems that rather than being “children’s fat”, this type of fat exists physiologically throughout adulthood.
Why Does Brown Fat Matter?
Brown adipose tissue, unlike white adipose tissue which is found around the waistline and other areas, lives in brown fat deposits. These deposits are strategically hidden throughout your body to provide a layer of insulation that can be used to keep you warm when exposed to cold air or water. It gets its name from the color it turns when exposed to heat since it takes on an orange hue.
Besides keeping you warm through cold exposure, recent research has shown that brown fat plays key roles in blood sugar regulation, hunger control (especially for diabetes), energy expenditure (which aids weight loss), and even heart health.
Numerous studies have recently been done on animals that found that significant or complete elimination of brown adipose tissue causes an increase in weight gain and related diseases such as diabetes.
While this research is still pending in human trials, the very fact that brown fat has so much to offer cardiovascular health and metabolism suggests that it could be used for making drastic improvements to metabolic conditions.
One study on mice found that activating/increasing subcutaneous (underneath the skin) brown adipose tissue significantly reduced blood sugar levels. This showed significant potential for treating diabetes effectively through means other than pharmaceutical enhancements or invasive surgeries.
How Does Brown Fat Work?
The process behind brown adipose tissue is relatively straightforward. When you expose your body to cold air or water, it signals a series of reactions that increases your body’s internal temperature by burning calories at a rapid rate. This is shown first by the activation of an enzyme called AMPK inside the mitochondria. Once active, this enzyme increases cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP). cAMP then activates three different enzymes which all work together to increase thermogenesis (the creation of heat) and endogenously produced reactive oxygen species (free radicals) within the [mitochondria].
These two compounds, working together in tandem to increase cellular respiration and destroy free radicals, bond with fat cells, creating a “symbiotic” relationship. This is because when your body produces more heat than it can keep up with, the mitochondria metabolize this extra energy by bonding it with fats and making heat from it. The result is brown adipose tissue turning into an organ that burns white fat to create heat.
As you might have noticed from its interaction with blood sugar regulation, the main goal of brown adipose tissue is not weight loss. If anything, brown adipose tissue has been associated with weight gain. Several times in mice, it’s also been shown that brown fat is not present in humans after infancy. This finding suggests only the potential to increase brown adipose tissue rather than the actual ability to do so.
Why Does Brown Fat Matter?
Now you might be wondering why this entire discussion about physiology has any implications for weight loss pills. It seems like there are too many steps between activating enzymes and activating thermogenesis to get anything useful out of it. However, new research suggests otherwise. One breakthrough study by Dr Seth Ginsberg, published in 2012, showed that pathways could be manipulated directly instead of waiting for the body’s natural activation of them [6]. This paper outlines how researchers found chemical compounds capable of inhibiting specific pathways which lead directly to reactive oxygen species production inside the mitochondria and energizing brown adipose tissue.
The most exciting part of this study is that these chemical compounds can actually be transferred to humans with no severe side effects. It even goes one step further by demonstrating the ability to reduce weight gain in obese mice without negative consequences [7]. This means we may have a way of directly manipulating pathways such as AMPK and cAMP (both found to increase brown fat activity) for optimal weight loss performance.
Understanding the mechanism behind brown adipose tissue doesn’t just help us see how research on it will affect our bodies but also why it’s so crucial in the first place. Now you know that your body uses heat (thermogenesis) as a natural defense against cold weather. Without it, you’d have a hard time surviving the harsh winters.
Effects of Increased Brown Adipose Tissue
One of the most exciting things about brown fat is its immediate effects on your body to burn calories and lose weight. Studies show that increased levels of brown adipose tissue can make your metabolism run better. This means that by increasing your brown adipose tissue, you will burn calories more efficiently than before. According to experts in the industry, every pound of brown adipose tissue burns about 30 to 50 calories per day.
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