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What if you had a special kind of fat in your body that burned calories instead of storing them -- and it could be activated simply by spending time in the cold?


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See, and I just thought Brown Fat was why you still tried to get a touch of sun. it looks better than white fat, you know.

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Cylie.... in a permanent state of confusion

HI,

Dr. Spiegelman has used this system — a pair of proteins that switch on the brown fat cell’s distinctive genes — to convert both mouse and human skin cells into brown fat cells.

Brown fat cells have a very different role from the better-known white fat cells. The white cells store fat; the brown cells burn it off as heat.

Babies have lots of brown fat to help keep warm. Until April 2009, biologists believed that the brown fat quickly disappeared and was not found in adults. Dr. Sven Enerback of the University of Goteborg in Sweden and others then reported that some brown fat tissue persisted in adults, raising the possibility that if the cells could be made more active, a person might burn off more fat.

In a parallel line of research that has now converged with the brown fat discovery, Dr. Spiegelman has long been studying the body’s white fat cells and how they are controlled. In 1994 he found the body’s master regulator of white fat cells. Turning to brown fat cells, he followed the general assumption that they were derived from white fat cells.

A key element in making brown fat cells seemed to be a kind of protein called a zinc finger (because it reaches into the spiral of a DNA molecule to switch on particular genes). Dr. Spiegelman figured that if he inactivated all the relevant zinc finger proteins in brown fat cells, they should turn back into their precursors, the white fat cells.

The experiment worked. The brown fat cells did revert, but not into white fat cells. They turned into muscle cells.

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