Researchers discover how to fight fat ... with fat March 8, 2012
Though it's long been known that there are two forms of fat or
adipose tissue, white, which stores calories, and brown, which
burns them for energy and warmth, figuring out how to safely
create more of the desirable brown type has remained elusive. In
an ideal world, there'd simply be a switch one could flip to
convert white fat into brown and obesity would eventually become
a thing of the past. Now, UC San Francisco (UCSF) Diabetes
Center brown fat researcher Shingo Kajimura and his team have
made a discovery that leads them to believe they've found that
switch and one day, it just may lead to the long-sought solution
for human obesity. "It used to be thought that brown fat only
exists in small animals, and only in infants in humans,"
Kajimura said. "Now we know that most adult humans have a
significant amount of brown fat. A few years ago, we discovered
a protein called PRDM16," he added. "This protein is considered
to be a master regulator of