How Fat Could Make You Thin

All fat is bad fat, especially if it lands on your hips, right? Well, some researchers at Johns Hopkins University think the story may be a little more complicated than that. In a study published in the journal Cell Biology, they say that they have found a way to change white fat into brown fat, which burns off more energy.

Interested? I thought so.

The researchers took a close look at the properties of the two different types of fat. White fat is what we think of as ordinary fat, the kind that forms muffin tops, beer bellies and all those other lovely things. It is the body's main storehouse for extra calories and contains a single drop of lipid, a building block of fat tissue.

Brown fat contains many drops of lipid, which each contain their own power source. That means it can generate heat. Babies are born with this fat to protect them against cold but adults have very little of it.

The Johns Hopkins researchers designed an experiment to see if they could change the expression of a protein known to stimulate eating. They did this in rats, and when they autopsied the rats' fat content after they died, they found brown fat rather than the expected white. The rats also ate less and weighed less than at the beginning of the experiment.

The researchers say that changing the protein may have activated brown fat stem cells. It's not at all clear yet how this might apply to humans. We'll have to wait for future research. But the idea that fat could actually burn energy is certainly intriguing.

In the meantime, I am going to stick to stuff that works now, like eating spicy food, cutting calories and focusing on superfoods.