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Obesity

Be cool, lose weight

Nature volume 458, pages 839–840 (2009)Cite this article

To lose weight, would you rather diet, exercise or subject yourself to cool temperatures? The last choice is not such an odd one, as adult humans have brown fat tissue that burns calories in response to cold.

Fat is mainly stored in two types of adipose tissue: white and brown. White adipose tissue stores calories as large lipid droplets within individual cells. By contrast, brown adipose tissue (BAT) stores little fat, instead burning it to produce heat and regulate body temperature. Small mammals and newborn humans have copious amounts of BAT around their shoulder blades, which helps them to survive cold temperatures. Adult humans, however, were largely thought to lack BAT, with only one investigation1 describing adipose tissue that seemed to function as BAT. Three independent studies2,3,4, just published in The New England Journal of Medicine, follow up this observation, and conclusively identify BAT in adult humans.

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Figure 1: When fat is good.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stephen R. Farmer is in the Department of Biochemistry, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Massachusetts 02118, USA. farmer@biochem.bumc.bu.edu,

    Stephen R. Farmer

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  1. Stephen R. Farmer
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Farmer, S. Be cool, lose weight. Nature 458, 839–840 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/458839a

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