When losing weight food activates brown adipose tissue

Through eating, thermogenesis of brown fat increases

Because brown fat cells consume energy, they could be the key to losing weight and important for preventing obesity and diabetes. Researchers have now been able to prove that brown fat is activated by eating.

Brown fat helps with weight loss

Last year, US researchers reported a new fat-and-fat patch to help lose weight by converting white fat, which normally stores energy, into brown fat, which burns the energy. Also designed by researchers from Singapore medicine plaster, which managed to reduce the belly fat by more than 30 percent, based on this effect. And only a few months ago, a study was published, which showed that people with a significantly higher proportion of brown fat, despite higher food intake does not get overweight. Now, researchers have shown that brown fat is activated by eating.

Brown fat cells consume energy. They may therefore be important for the prevention of obesity and diabetes. Researchers have now been able to prove that brown fat is activated by eating. (Image: Kurhan / fotolia.com)

Energy of storage fats is burned

Brown adipose tissue in humans has been the subject of numerous scientific studies because it has the exact opposite function of white adipose tissue, which stores energy in the form of storage fats, the so-called triacylglycerides.

Brown fat burns the energy of these storage fats (thermogenesis).

However, the activity of this physiologically particularly favorable adipose tissue changes and decreases with age, as well as in obese and diabetics.

That is why it is looking for ways to cheer the thermogenesis of brown fat and to use for the prevention of obesity and diabetes.

Improved control of blood sugar

In this context, only one option was previously known: cold-induced thermogenesis.

"Studies showed that subjects who spent hours each day in the cold chamber not only increased the calorific value of brown fat in the cold, but also improved the blood glucose control of insulin," said Professor Martin Klingenspor from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in a statement.

Scientists at the TUM, in collaboration with an international team, have now been able to prove that the diet increases the thermogenesis of brown fat, and not only by cold, as previously assumed.

The results of the study were published in the journal "Cell Metabolism".

How brown adipose tissue is activated

The recent study by the University of Turku (Finland) in collaboration with international experts, including Professor Martin Klingenspor and his team from the Else Kröner-Fresenius Center for Nutritional Medicine of the TUM, examined how a carbohydrate meal affects the activity of brown adipose tissue effect.

"It was shown for the first time that the heat formation in brown adipose tissue is activated by a test meal as well as by exposure to cold," the researcher sums up the result.

According to the study, the same subjects were tested twice for the study: once after exposure to cold, and a second time after eating a carbohydrate-rich meal. There was also a control group.

Before and after, important markers for thermogenesis were measured, including not only glucose and fatty acid intake, but also oxygen consumption in brown fat.

Indirect calorimetry was used in combination with positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET / CT).

Energy evaporates

"Ten percent of the energy consumed per day is lost through the thermogenic effects of food," explains Prof. Martin Klingenspor.

This postprandial post-meal thermogenesis is not only due to the need for intact heat build-up due to intestinal muscle activity, secretion and digestive processes. There seems to be an optional contribution to which brown fat contributes.

Another subject of the investigation will be to find out if this is just energy that "fizzles" or if this phenomenon has another function.

"We now know that activation of brown adipose tissue may be associated with satiety," says Klingenspor. This should now show more studies. (Ad)