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What the heck is brown fat?
July 27, 2009
Did you miss the CNN feature a few weeks ago when Dr. Sanjay Gupta explained why you should be aware of brown fat? Did you also miss Dr. Mehmet Oz’s explanation on brown fat as well?
Well after being taken by surprise by this new nutritional news, I asked my editor Colleen to help shed some light on something I frankly had not heard about until recently.
If you missed the facts about brown fat, I hope this feature will bring you up to speed.
Feature by our Editorial Assistant Colleen
Did you know that brown fat is actually something you should pay attention to and add to your diet? But what is it?
Well brown fat is responsible for warming up your body’s temperature and essentially helps your body burn calories. Brown fat is more useful than white fat when it comes to helping you achieve your weight loss goals. You see, white fat doesn’t really do anything but sit around in your body and releases chemical and hormones that doesn’t really do much for your health. White fat just stores up your calories (but it also stores up energy for you) and sits there creating those unwanted waistlines (aka belly fat).
Brown fat, on the other hand, is what we all need more of!
Idealistically, if you were to have a lot of brown fat it would burn calories faster, just like when you were younger and you were able to eat almost anything and not really gain any weight. That also perhaps explains why you have some friends who seem to be able to eat anything they want and not gain a pound.
As I write this, there are researchers frantically trying to form a drug to activate more brown fat cells which might be useful for many people who have trouble losing weight.
Here’s some more facts about brown fat that might help:
1) Typically brown fat is found the most in newborns.
2) Brown fat cells are activated when your temperature changes. So when it’s cold out the brown fat cells start working and warming up your body.
3) Brown fat is found mostly in rodents as opposed to humans.
4) As you get older, the amount of brown fat cells you have decreases.
5) You can’t actually see brown fat. It surrounds your organs and can be seen as hot spots in scans.
Photo by jakeliefer
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September 3rd, 2009 at 19:58
I was also wondering what brown fat was all about and I’m quite happy that you were able to give an accurate explanation? Finally an explanation for brown fat!
September 7th, 2009 at 3:56
Wow… I never thought of that! How can I increase the number of brown fats in my body? Where can I get that? I think that is my problem all the way.