Fat determines who is skinny?
As our society grows, both in girth and population, the obsession with finding a cure for obesity has grown alongside it. While most solutions are thought to be found in products or surgery, scientists are looking inside the human body for part of the answer. In a recent editorial, New Scientist looked at the potential weight loss benefits of brown fat — a heat-generating tissue that converts extra energy into heat.
Differences in the amount of brown fat each person has may help to explain why some of us are slim while others are overweight, and why many of us pile on the pounds as we age.
What we know as baby fat is, in many cases, brown fat. As it gets broken down by mitochondria, brown fat releases energy as heat. This process of heat generation, known as thermogenesis, helps babies stay warm. But as we get older the amount of brown fat decreases and until recently was thought to disappear entirely because humans are more capable of regulating their temperatures without the fatty tissue.
