By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay reporter
MONDAY, Jan 11, 2021 (HealthDay News) – A new study suggests that a special calorie-burning body fat protects against a number of chronic conditions including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure.
Brown fat creates heat by drawing glucose from the bloodstream, unlike energy-storing white fat, explained lead researcher Dr. Paul Cohen. He is an assistant professor and senior attending physician at Rockefeller University Hospital in New York City.
This type of handkerchief sounds like a godsend. However, it has long been believed that brown fat has little impact on human health because your stores of brown fat decrease with age.
However, research shows that adults with active brown adipose tissue in their bodies are far less likely to suffer from a range of chronic diseases than their peers.
In addition, this protective effect persists even if the person is overweight, researchers recently reported in the journal Nature Medicine.
“When we grouped our subjects based on their body mass index, we found that even obese people with brown fat offer protection from these conditions,” Cohen said.
“For example, type 2 diabetes is known to be more common in overweight and obese people. However, we found that even obese people with brown fat are significantly less likely to get type 2 diabetes than obese people without brown fat. ” he went on.
Brown fat is believed to be an evolutionary response to cold weather, and it helps generate heat to help maintain the body’s core temperature, experts say.
“Babies can’t shiver, and when they’re cold they activate the brown fat and stay warm that way,” said Ruth Loos, director of the Obesity Genetics and Related Metabolic Traits program at the Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
“For a long time it was believed to be present in babies, and as we got older it was believed to go away,” Loos said. “Now with better measurement methods, we know that it won’t go away completely in adults. Some people have measurable amounts of brown fat that we didn’t know before.”
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Cohen said that studies done about a decade ago “got a lot of excitement because they showed that adult humans have brown fat that can be stimulated by exposure to cold and that it is functional, which means it can get glucose out of the.” Blood circulation. ”
Brown fat is in a layer of fat under the skin, typically in an area that extends from the base of the head and along the shoulders to the spine, said Dr. Aaron Cypess, Acting Director of Translational Physiology, Department of Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Obesity, United States National Institute on Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Researchers can detect active brown fat stores using PET scans, usually used to diagnose and track cancer by looking for tissues that burn high levels of glucose.
Cohen and his team reached out to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and received more than 130,000 PET scans of more than 52,000 patients. They then checked these scans to look for brown fat deposits.
Almost 10% of the patients wore active brown fat, Cohen said. He added that this is likely an underestimate as patients who underwent the scans were advised to avoid cold exposure, exercise, and caffeine, all of which increase brown fat activity.
The researchers confirmed previous findings about brown fat – that women wear it more often than men, that the amount of brown fat decreases with age and weight gain, and that active brown fat is more likely to be found in scans done in cold versus warm weather.
When the research team compared the brown fat values with the patient’s medical histories, they found new connections between brown fat tissue and better overall health for people, regardless of weight.
For example, people with active brown fat have improved cholesterol and blood sugar levels. They were also less likely to have high cholesterol, coronary artery disease, heart failure, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes.
“Some of these associations have never been documented before,” Cohen said, although the study didn’t definitively prove that brown fat reduces the risk of disease.
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It’s not yet clear why this link might exist, Cypess said.
“Is the simple process of burning glucose and fat keeping you warm, or does brown fat also act as an endocrine organ that releases hormones into the blood for these benefits?” Said Cypess.
Cohen noted that it doesn’t take extreme cold to activate brown fat – even a few hours in a 60-degree Fahrenheit room is sufficient.
That temperature “is cool, but certainly not cold,” Cohen said. “I find it fascinating from a public health perspective that simply lowering our thermostats a few degrees can produce health benefits.”
Researchers and drug companies are also studying drugs that might activate brown fat and promote these benefits, Cohen said.
However, the experts all agreed that too little is known about brown fat for anyone to try either to lose weight or gain health benefits by frolicking in cool rooms or the cold outdoors.
“If you’ve eaten less with a meal, it may be better to lose some weight than try to increase your brown fat,” Cypess said. “I’m still going to tell you that you need to have two healthy meals and exercise, and we hope we can incorporate brown fat activity into that plan.”
More information
The US National Institutes of Health has more about brown fat.
SOURCES: Dr. med. Paul Cohen, assistant professor and chief attending physician, Rockefeller University Hospital, New York City; Ruth Loos, PhD, Director, Obesity Genetics and Related Metabolic Traits Program, Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City; Aaron Cypess, MD, PhD, associate director of the Department of Translational Physiology, Department of Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Obesity, United States National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases; Nature Medicine, Jan. 4, 2021, online
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