Brown fat can help you lose weight, as it burns calories to produce heat

Fat that makes you thin? That sounds like a contradiction, but it has become a hot topic among researchers racing to find a safe and effective solution to obesity and its associated metabolic diseases.

The spotlight is on brown fat, a type of "good fat" which until a few years ago was thought to exist only in babies and small animals. Found mainly in the neck, around the collarbone and upper half of the spine, brown fat is nature's way of helping infants keep warm while they haven't yet developed the ability to shiver to maintain their body temperature.

Unlike white fat - which infamously shows up as flabby bellies, love handles and plump thighs - brown fat burns, rather than stores, calories (in the process producing heat).

About 10 per cent of a newborn's total body fat is brown fat, but this quickly diminishes in infancy, according to Roger Wong Hoi-fung, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong's department of chemistry.

In 2009, researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Centre in Boston, the US, showed for the first time that brown fat existed in adults - although in different amounts based on a variety of factors such as age, glucose levels and level of obesity.

Now, researchers, including Wong, are hoping to unlock the secrets behind brown fat. They're searching for ways to preserve, make more of, or activate brown fat, ultimately, to develop a tool to combat the epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes, fatty liver and other metabolic diseases.