What Color is Your Fat?
Who Knew? I didn’t! Fat cells come in designer colors. OK, not exactly. In reality, there are only two colors, brown and white, which can hardly be referred to as “designer colors.”
But here’s the interesting part. Those nasty white fat cells are the ones we are all familiar with – the ones that make us, well, fat. And then there are the brown fat cells. One would assume that a fat cell is a fat cell and all fat cells should be equally abhorred. But we should not be so quick to judge all our fat cells using the same measuring stick.
It has always been thought that babies have brown fat cells to help them regulate their body temperatures, but that the brown fat cells are quickly lost as we mature, leaving us with only those despicable white fat cells. However, recent articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine report that studies using PET scans have now shown that adults actually retain significant amounts of brown fat cells, primarily in the area between our shoulder blades.
Why is that significant. White fat cells make us fat. Brown fat cells actually burn fat (you can read that as “make us leaner”). OK, great. So where can we get some more of these brown fat cells. All I can tell you is that they are working on that. Sorry.
[As an aside, knowing how capitalism works here in the US, some enterprising marketer will no doubt read the same article I did and come out with a super-duper Brown Fat Cell Supplement guaranteed to raise your brown fat cells by a gazillion. Consumer beware!]
