When it comes to fighting body fat, many are content following the proverbial saying “burn the belly fat”, without trying to understand the composition of body fat. Like good and bad cholesterol, there are good and bad body fat. A latest study has found that good fat helps to get rid of the bad one.
In common parlance it is widely known that the body needs essential fat—it protects the body from infectious diseases and saves internal organs from bruises.
It is widely held that the minimum healthy body fat is six per cent for males, and nine per cent for females of normal body weight. The essential fat can be categorised as subcutaneous that lies directly under the skin and intramuscular that is contained in the muscle.
The revolutionary finding is on brown fat and white fat. As the body gets older it transforms brown into white fat more frequently. Infants are packed with brown fat, it keeps them warm. Considered as the “good fat,” this almost always disappears by adulthood. Brown fat is stored mostly around the neck and under the collarbone. The good thing about brown fat is that it spurs the body to burn calories to generate body heat. Now three studies—from researchers in Boston, Finland and the Netherlands—show that some brown fat remains in adults, affecting metabolism and potentially offering a target to help people shed pounds.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wrote on the NIH Director’s Blog that brown fat doesn’t necessarily completely disappear in adulthood; some reserves in our shoulders remain. People who harbour more brown fat than white are more likely to be leaner, and researchers hope to find a way to increase brown fat in the body.
“It would be potentially therapeutic if we could transform some of our white fat into brown,” Collins wrote. “Determining which genes control the development of white and brown fat may be the first step toward developing game changing treatments for diabetes and obesity.”
Brown fat is used to generate heat, and white fat stores energy, but too much of white fat can lead to obesity. Accumulating white fat around the abdomen in particular can lead to a higher risk of heart disease and can narrow and harden arteries, whereas buildup of fat around the hips doesn’t have the same effect. This extra abdominal fat can also cause diabetes and other metabolic diseases, and is more likely to occur with the onset of middle age, which brings hormonal changes and a drop in metabolism with it.
So how could researchers use these basic findings about good fat to eventually come up with a weight-loss medication? One possibility would be a pill to stimulate a specific protein to release more energy from the fat cells in the form of heat rather than storing it for future energy needs.
Finding a way to increase the amount of brown fat in a person would be another strategy. Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston have been injecting certain genes into mice to try to produce brown fat cells instead of white ones.
Celi said researchers also could try to make a pill that stimulates nerve endings inside brown fat to make it burn more calories.
