Brown Fat: MRI Scan May Lead To Weight Loss Breakthrough

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fat-stomachFor the first time, researchers have identified brown fat in a living human – a find that could lead to development of future weight loss treatments.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, researchers from Warwick Medical School, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust in Britain, identified the presence of brown fat tissue in a human adult. The existing method, positron emission tomography (PET), identifies active brown fat, but the team’s MRI research shows presence of the actual tissue.

This finding is significant as brown fat may aid future weight loss strategies.

“What most of us imagine is ‘fat’ is actually white fat, which stores [excess] energy and increases in size, [leading to] obesity. But there is another type of fat: brown fat,” study author Thomas Barber, an associate professor in endocrinology and honorary consultant endocrinologist at Warwick Medical School and UHCW NHS Trust, told FoxNews.com. “What it does is the complete opposite. Instead of storing energy, it actually burns off energy, and in that process, it releases heat.”

When an individual intakes food, most of those calories are used to keep the body functioning – but excess food can’t be destroyed and ends up stored in white fat, or adipose. When brown fat is active, it burns off this excess energy from white fat and creates heat, leading to weight loss. Temperature, exercise, and elevations of adrenaline and thyroid hormone may lead to activation of brown fat, but, because this is still an emerging field, scientific understanding is still incomplete, Barber said.

“It’s been estimated that a sugar cube size of brown fat, if activated maximally for a year, could burn its way through 6.6 to 8.8 pounds of white fat during that time,” Barber said. “[You] don’t need to have abundant amounts…if you could find a way of activating the brown fat reserves you have.”

While a PET scan is able to identify active brown fat, the tissue is not always active. The MRI scan findings make way for further research into assessing how to take advantage of brown fat’s function. According to researchers, the MRI scans can potentially be used as indicators for how much brown fat is in an average human adult, once the technology is further developed. Additionally, this research could be utilized for developing new therapies to increase an individual’s brown fat levels.

Read more at FOX NEWS.

{Matzav.com Newscenter}


2 COMMENTS

  1. White fat…brown fat….nonsense…es veiniger in geb nisht nuch ala taavas…thats it.Eat when you’re hungry and not with your eyes.Stop eating before you’re full.Eat with nature…healthy..cut the man made chazerie…and u won’t have to worry about obesity.Controlling your taavas…and discipline yourself….goes for this and all other ills of society. People want quick fixes.There are none.Nothing good comes easy. Hashem aint handing you things on a platter…He wants you to work hard…yes..hard work..teach you a lesson or two in life…

  2. The emes is that if your hormones insulin, ghrelin, etc. & thyroid are not in balance then you may feel hungry all the time even after what ought to be a satisfying meal. You can call it ta’ava, and that is certainly how it appears to onlookers, but it is often rooted in biology.

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