April 9th, 2009
Brown fat, white fat, big fat
The funniest health story of the week has to be the silliness over brown fat.
(Artist Bill Zeman offers prints of watercolors like this, dubbed Polar Bears, for reasonable prices. Check him out.)
The Joslin Diabetes Center has published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that adults retain intermuscular “good” fat that is relatively easy to burn off.
A second study, from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, showed this fat can be activated by being in a cold place.
Most of it is in the neck or chest, PET scans showed, and women have more of it than men. Younger people have more than old ones. For fatties it is generally inactive.
What does this mean? People with normal weight have some fat they use to stay warm on cold days. Thin members of the polar bear club (like these folks) are doing themselves some good.
Some in the media, however, jumped right in with big conclusions, like activating “brown fat” can help you lose “white fat” (the bad kind around your middle) and thus get thin. How do you do this? Try exercise.
There’s not much of this good fat, however. Just a few ounces. The hope is studies of a messenger protein called BMP7, which promotes brown fat, could lead to new therapies for obesity. But that is some distance away.
Perhaps the silliest take was that of the Wall Street Journal, which illustrated its piece on brown fat with some overweight people whom, the studies show, are filled with the nasty white stuff. (Although it is fun to think that, when it comes to fat, brown is good and white is bad.)
What’s the bottom line? Thin people have some fat inside them for ready energy, and the overweight, sedentary schlubs around you need extra coats in the winter because they can’t activate theirs.
Oh, and when you see a supermodel without her wrap on a cold day, and she says she’s not feeling the cold, or that she’s enjoying it, she is telling the truth and doesn’t need your coat.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 04/09/09
