BROWN FAT METABOLISM

MAKING YOUR FAT CELLS WORK FOR YOU

The most common fat on your body, is white fat, which is stored primarily around your belly, torso, hips, and upper thighs.

White fat is where your body stores fuel for the long term and can be mobilized for energy. It has a limited blood supply, making it white in color.

Another type of fat in the body is brown fat, which is light brown in color due to its rich blood supply and numerous pigmented mitochondria. Brown fat is most commonly found in babies, around the neck, collarbones, and spine.

Babies lack the ability to shiver, so their bodies use brown fat to keep warm in times of unexpected temperature drops.

Until recently, it was thought that this brown fat disappeared after early infancy. However, an important study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009 concluded that many, perhaps all, adults still have stores of brown fat.

More recently, in 2014 , a study published in Cell Metabolism reported that it was possible—under the right conditions—for adults to turn some white fat cells into brown fat cells.

How do you get your dormant brown fat cells to reemerge and reignite? The answer is adaptive thermodynamics. On the following page, I’ve described various ways you can involve adaptive thermodynamics in your weight loss program.

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Expose Your Skin to Cold Temperatures

Cold temperatures send a signal to the brain that stimulates brown fat activity in two ways: by acting on your vascular system directly to increase blood flow to your brown fat stores, and by sending nerve impulses to brown fat cells that provide an additional boost in cellular actions.

How cold do you have to be? A Japanese research team found that sitting in a 59ºF room for two hours wearing summer clothing will stimulate brown fat to burn an extra 100 to 250 calories.

The researchers also found that half the test subjects under age thirty-eight showed signs of brown fat activation in a 66ºF setting. Results were less impressive for people older than thirty-eight.

Activate Brown Fat with Cold Feet

In one study, Swedish researchers scanned five subjects after they’d spent two hours at temperatures ranging between 63ºF and 66ºF.

During the scan itself, the subjects cooled their body temperatures even further by repeatedly placing one foot in ice water for 5 minutes at a time, followed by 5 minutes out of the water, then doing the same with the other foot.

The scientists reported that not only did all the subjects have detectable brown fat deposits, but that the added foot exposure to the ice water boosted their brown fat activity fifteen fold.

Do Your Workouts in Cool Temperatures

Boost the number of calories you burn during exercise by stimulating your brown fat stores during your workouts. How? Exercise in a setting kept at 64ºF or lower. Even better: Make sure your skin is uncovered, because the evaporation of sweat as you exercise adds to the cooling effect.

What you don’t want to do: Increase your perspiration by turning up the heat when you exercise. The hotter environment will actually shut down brown fat activity.

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Stimulate Your Body’s Melatonin Production

The hormone melatonin helps regulate our sleep-wake cycles. Research published in the Journal of Pineal Research reported that in rats, melatonin increases the presence of “beige” fat, which is similar to brown fat in its calorie-burning abilities.

Experts say that rather than taking a melatonin supplement, it’s best to stimulate your body’s natural production of melatonin by avoiding nighttime exposure to light from computers and other screens, getting 20 minutes of sunlight exposure most days, and loading up on melatonin-rich foods such as almonds, peanuts, tomatoes, and broccoli.

Improve Your Blood Sugar Metabolism with More Brown Fat

Brown fat may have unique diabetes-fighting properties. People with lower glucose levels tend to have more brown fat than those with higher levels, which indicates that it may play a role in blood sugar.

For example, one group of investigators found that a certain protein in brown fat appears to enhance the metabolism of white fat.

When they studied a strain of experimental mice who were lacking this protein, they found that the mice expended less energy, gained weight, and developed diabetes.

In another study, a research team transplanted a small amount of brown fat into the abdomens of a group of mice.

After eight weeks, the mice given the transplants were not only leaner than a placebo group, but also process d glucose better and had reduced insulin resistance.

Increase Your Metabolic Set Point with More Brown Fat

Set point is the body weight at which the brain automatically begins to slow metabolic rate, making it more difficult to remove additional flab.

By stoking metabolic activity, brown fat could help combat the metabolic slowdown that occurs when people start dropping significant fat.

If someone is able to burn an extra 200 or 300 calories a day through their brown fat, that is enough to shed a pound of body fat in just a couple of weeks.

As Americans get older, they typically add 10 pounds of fat per decade.

The calorie-burning advance from brown fat could be enough to combat or reverse this weight gain and help older individuals maintain the fat percentage they had as young adults.

Consider a Low-Fat, High-Carbohydrate Eating Plan

Radiologists want to decrease brown fat activity when doing scans of cancer patients, because the heat generated by brown fat makes it harder to see tumor-related activity.

As a consequence, they recommend that patients eat high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets before scans, since such diets reduce brown fat activation.

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Eat More Apples, Including the Peel

New research shows that ursolic acid—a substance that occurs in high concentrations in apple skins—increases brown fat and muscle mass, while at the same time reducing fat and improving glucose tolerance.

If you don’t like apples, other foods that contain ursolic acid include cranberries, blueberries, plums, and prunes.

Take Charge of Your Thermostat

Turning the thermostat down in your bedroom to 66ºF significantly increases your nightly metabolism and caloric burn.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center examined how long-term exposure to moderately cold temperatures affected fat cells in five healthy male volunteers.

The volunteers spent four consecutive months sleeping in temperature-controlled rooms.

Only a single sheet was available as a cover for each participant. During the day, the participants were allowed to perform their activities as normal.

The following protocol was used: Researchers kept the overnight temperature at 75ºF for the first month, followed by 66ºF for the second month, 75ºF for the third month, and 81ºF for the fourth.

Sleeping in the higher-temperature environments had no effect on their brown fat and even suppressed it.

I’ve found that most of my research subjects can adapt, within several weeks, to sleeping in a cooler bedroom.

In the winter, you can keep the heat low, lighten your covers, shun electric blankets, and even practice keeping one leg uncovered.

IN no time, you’ll get the hang of applying adaptive thermodynamics on your inner and outer body. And your emerging brown fat will give your metabolism a significant boost.