Brown fat vs white fat: how one helps fight obesity by burning energy rather than storing it
While white fat stores energy, brown fat burns off the extra calories, expending energy you don’t want to store, studies show. Now we need to know how to add more brown fat
We might all be a little better off if we had more fat, researchers are discovering.
But before you reach for the crisps, know that they’re talking about a different kind of fat – brown fat, which is radically apart from the white fat that characterises obesity. In a sense, they’re opposites. One burns energy; the other stores it.
Patrick Seale, associate professor of cell and development biology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, studies fats and their relationship to metabolic diseases such as diabetes. He recently received an outstanding early career investigator award for his study of brown fat from the Endocrine Society, an international association focusing on hormone research.
Seale knows the issues both as a scientist and as a regular guy. “I still struggle all the time with losing weight,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I’m fascinated with it. I just find it interesting to think about how all this works.”
He described the difference between the two fats. Brown fat functions to burn energy, and it does this to make heat. “The heat is really important, especially in small animals, for maintaining body temperature. For example, mice that have defective brown fat can’t survive in the cold,” he said.