Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is sometimes referred to as brown fat. BAT was first discovered in rodents, and its role in mammals has since been confirmed. While white adipose tissue (WAT) stores energy, brown adipose tissue burns it by producing heat through a process called thermogenesis. Thermogenesis involves activating BAT mitochondria, which are more efficient at burning calories than those of WAT. Though white fat is commonly associated with obesity , new research suggests that brown fat might be useful for weight loss . Read on to learn about brown adipose tissue.
Do you know that your body has different colours of fats?
Scientists have distinguished both white and brown fat.
Activating brown fat is the latest popular trend for weight management. It is often called “good” fat.
“Every cell of our body has mitochondria, it is known as a heat generating engine. Brown fat has mitochondria in a large number, so if your body generates more heat you will burn more fat,”.
Related: How To Increase Brown Adipose Tissue
Brown fat vs. White fat
“We all know that our body has three types of fats in our body – visceral fat, subcutaneous fat and triglycerides. These are broadly known as white fat,”.
White fat is what you’ve likely known about your whole life.
Too much white fat isn’t good for health as it leads to obesity, a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases.
Brown fat has plentiful mitochondria, which is how it gets its colour.
It is an incredible mechanism that “brown fat is often found much in babies or infants as they need energy and need to heat the body to avoid sudden death of babies. Brown fat does both. Brown fat gives energy and heats our body. ”
Adults have small supplies of brown fat. It’s typically stored around the shoulders and neck.
Also see: What is Brown Adipose Tissue? What Is It, Location, Function, and More
How to have brown fat
The simple answer, “Exercise and eat well”.
To generate more brown fat, regular exercise is highly advisable, and it is also essential to follow a well-balanced diet made up of whole foods.
Sleep is another vital element to get brown fat.
“You might have observed that kids sleep for longer hours…and when you sleep your system, your hormone, your melatonin function is correct, then your body can store more brown fat,”.
So generally speaking if the brown fat in the body is increased it results in more health and vitality and the best way to do it by regularly exercising and making conscious healthy eating choices.
The most interesting thing about BAT is that it burns fat and calories faster than any other tissue in your body. The more brown fat you have, the easier it will be for you to lose weight and keep it off. Specifically, unlike white fat cells, which burn very few calories every day, BAT burns quite a lot of calories—even when you're at rest. And in fact, BAT is so metabolically active that just a small deposit of brown fat can significantly increase your metabolic rate (and with it, your ability to burn calories and lose weight). But how do you know if you have enough brown adipose tissue?
A GAME CHANGER! How to Burn Fat and Build Muscle WITHOUT Diet or Exercise!
Brown fat flexes its muscle to burn energy — and calories
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| Brown fat tissue from a mouse |
Brown fat cells, which help mammals regulate their body temperature, work much like muscle cells, the researchers discovered. When the brain sends a signal to brown fat to start burning energy to generate heat, the cells stiffen, which triggers a biochemical pathway that ends with these cells burning calories for heat. The multidisciplinary research team of bioengineers and metabolic researchers teased apart the steps of this pathway and identified a potential way for drugs to switch on brown fat cells.
“We have figured out a new pathway that triggers brown fat tissue to consume calories from fat and sugars and radiate them away as heat,” said Andreas Stahl, professor and chairman of the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at Berkeley. “This understanding of how brown fat is activated could unlock new ways to combat obesity.”
The research was published March 6 in the journal Cell Metabolism. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Diabetes Association.
When cold, the human body shivers to produce heat in an attempt to maintain a body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Newborn babies, who can’t yet shiver, have a patch of brown fat between their shoulder blades, and its job is to take in nutrients to burn their energy to produce heat for regulating body temperature. Brown fat cells decrease in number as babies grow up, but adults still have a small number of brown fat cells that are not very active.
Here’s how brown fat works: When the body senses cold, the brain releases norepinephrine, which is detected by a receptor in brown fat cells. A cascade of biochemical signals is then triggered, leading to the production of a protein called Uncoupling Factor-1 (UCP1), which travels into the mitochondria of brown fat cells.
A normal cell uses mitochondria like a battery to perform work. Mitochondria turn nutrients from the diet into energy that is mostly stored in a molecule called ATP. But in brown fat cells, UCP1 short-circuits that battery, causing it to heat up instead of producing ATP. With UCP1 activated in the mitochondria, brown fat cells soak up fat and sugars from the diet and burn them for heat in the mitochondria.
Previous research found that brown fat shares some characteristics with muscle, particularly proteins called myosin, which are little motors that perform work. In muscle, myosin contracts the cells, but no one knew what myosin did in brown fat cells.
To find out, the researchers stimulated brown fat and measured how much the cell flexed by measuring the increase in tension in the cell. They found that the cells became roughly twice as stiff when stimulated. Then the researchers disabled the muscle-like myosin in brown fat cells and found that the cells became significantly softer, with their stiffness reduced by about a factor of two.
“Our finding that the muscle-like myosin is responsible for stiffening brown fat cells was really unexpected, no one has ever observed that,” Stahl said.
The study found that UCP1’s activity is directly tied to the increase in cell tension. The scientists then relieved the tension in activated brown fat cells and found that caused a 70 percent reduction in UCP1, so the cells generate less heat. The researchers then identified molecules in the cell that respond to increased tension to trigger the activation of UCP1. In experiments in mice, they disrupted these molecules and found that the brown fat cells lost their function and physically looked more like white fat cells, where the body stores excess energy.
“This study offers a remarkable example of how mechanical and other physical forces can influence physiology and disease in powerful, unexpected ways,” said Sanjay Kumar, Berkeley professor of bioengineering and a co-author of the study. “We hope that our work will aid in the design of therapeutic biomaterials and other technologies geared towards enhancing brown fat function.”
A GAME CHANGER! How to Burn Fat and Build Muscle WITHOUT Diet or Exercise!
The researchers used a drug to trigger increased tension in brown fat cells and found that the concept of activating tension can lead to burning calories, but much more work is needed to identify the right chemical compound that could do this effectively.
“Now that we better understand how brown fat cells work, we can think about ways to stimulate muscle-like myosin in brown fat to increase thermogenesis and burn calories,” Stahl said. “Drugs to stimulate muscle-like myosin in existing brown fat would probably create more active brown fat cells in adults.”
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