- More than 1 billion people globally are obese.
- Scientists predict that the number of people living with obesity around the world will hit 4 billion by 2050.
- Researchers from Southern Danish University in Denmark have found that activating healthy ‘brown fat’ in the body may help protect against obesity, via a mouse model.
Recent research states that
As obesity can harm a person’s overall health and increase their risk for
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
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.”
For this study, Kornfeld and his team focused on a protein called AC3-AT, which they found was responsible…
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