Recent research states that more than 1 billion peopleTrusted Source around the world have obesity, with scientists projecting that number may hit 4 billion by 2050Trusted Source.
As obesity can harm a person’s overall health and increase their risk for many diseasesTrusted Source, researchers continue to find ways to fight the condition.
Case in point — researchers from Southern Danish University in Denmark have found via a mouse model that activating healthy brown fat in the body may help protect against obesity.
The study was recently published in the journal Nature MetabolismTrusted Source.
What is brown fat?
Humans and other mammals have two main types of fat in the body — white fat and brown fat.
“White fat is an organ that stores calories from foods and whose size expands in obesity and causes medical problems,” Jan-Wilhelm Kornfeld, PhD, professor and co-founder of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Adipocyte Signaling (Adiposign) in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Southern Danish University, co-lead author of the current study, explained to Medical News Today.
“Brown fat stores only little amounts of fat, but in contrast can convert calories from food into heat which is thereby ‘lost’ for the body,” he noted.
“Uniquely, activation of brown fat can lead to turning over calories from food which is beneficial in obesity and cardiometabolic diseases,” Kornfeld added. “White fat is much less able to do so.”
Activating brown fat protects against obesity in animal models
For this study, Kornfeld and his team focused on a protein called AC3-AT, which they found was responsible for “switching off” brown fat activation.
“AC3-AT is a new protein uniquely ‘made’ in brown fat when you activate brown fat, e.g. by cold exposure of mice and humans,” Kornfeld detailed. “It helps to ‘shut down’ the beneficial properties of brown fat — increase calorie usage and metabolic activation. Strategies aiming to inactivate AC3-AT might thus release this ‘break’ of brown fat activation and make brown fat active for longer times.”
Researchers used a mouse model to test their theory. They found that mice who had AC3-AT removed from their genome were protected from obesity, as their bodies were better at burning calories and their metabolism sped up due to brown fat activation.
