Benefits of Baby Fat... We All Need More Brown Fat Cells

at 1:34 PM

Babies have a lot of so-called brown fat to help them stay warm until they get bigger and acquire other mechanisms to cope with cold. Scientists are trying to develop ways to increase brown fat to help adults, who mostly have white fat, lose weight. Recent studies show that adults still have some residual brown fat cells and this has spawned hope among scientists and drug developers that this calorie-burning tissue can be one method to fight obesity.

In 2007 Dr. Bruce Spiegelman, a professor of cell biology and medicine at Harvard's Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston, discovered a protein (PRDM16) that seems to regulate brown fat cells. In laboratory animals those without this protein do not produce good working brown fat cells. In animals that had a greater production of this protein, calorie burning and heat production increased. The Harvard team is now working to figure out how to control PRDM16 in humans. Brown fat cells are able to burn calories because of an abundance of mitochondria (dig out your biology textbooks!!!)- these are organelles in cells that basically burn your food to make energy. They are the engines of the cellular world. These cells are thought to have evolved to protect babies and children from hypothermia.

Researchers at various institutes are seeking ways to increase the body's ability to generate heat by taking advantage of the fact that brown cells become activated by cold. However if people compensate by eating more then the whole purpose is defeated. Now scientists are thinking about ways to train people to tolerate the cold better. The idea here is to rely on that internal furnace (brown fat cells) to burn more energy to create more heat.

Until we can find a way to increase our brown fat cells we need to eat less and move more.