Brown Fat Helps Fight Fat
There have been several articles in major news outlets about this lately. It’s the fact that a more darkly colored body fat, or adipose as it is called medically, may help to burn off the kind of fat that’s on your thighs and belly – in other words, the excess flab that you can never seem to get off. The problem is that most of us, as adults, have very little brown fat left on our bodies.
We have more in our youth, which may explain partly why kids have a much easier time maintaining their weight and seem to burn off every excess calorie that goes into their little bodies. Hence, what is considered simply a faster metabolism of our youth may actually just be the fact that we have much more of this beneficial brown fat in our bodies that burns fat at a much quicker pace, leaving our bodies slimmer and trimmer, and more “fat free”.
Of course, since scientists have discovered that this brown fat has fat burning properties that help us to metabolize normally fattening foods more easily and efficiently, thereby not storing as much bad fat as usual, they are trying to look for ways to again restore the balance between lightly colored fat and darkly colored fat in the human adult so that there is less obesity in the world and problems with weight control. Babies had a lot of this fat to keep them warm, so they are thinking there may be some mechanism they can manipulate to again get adults to grow this sort of fat.
It seems like there are so many factors lately, ranging from genes, and now this new discovery that brown fat helps to burn fat off the body, that we can’t really peg one true reason why adults become obese or why obesity has become such an epidemic as of late. I can think of a thousand reasons why people are overweight, the major one being too much calories consumption and an epidemic of inactivity, but there are admittedly other factors that add to that fact, it’s just that I don’t think there’s ever going to be one factor that we can turn on or off that will forever address obesity without good old fashioned self control and exercise.
