Brown fat Despite higher food intake no overweight

More brown body fat avoids overweight
There are people who seem to be able to eat everything and yet do not suffer from obesity. Others, in turn, just have to watch and eat food. Why this is so, medicine and science has been busy for some time. Researchers at the Technische Universität München (TUM) have found one of many possible explanations in the context of a study. Some people have a significantly higher proportion of brown fat. This "brown fat" is metabolically active and thus prevents excess pounds.

White fat makes up the majority of body fat and is responsible, among other things, for storing excess nutritional energy. In contrast, energy is converted into brown adipose tissue in the form of heat energy. It sits mainly in the neck, on the sternum and on the spine. In infants, the brown fat ensures the maintenance of body temperature, since the body surface is large and the muscle mass is still low. So far, it was assumed that it goes back in the youth and in adulthood hardly exists.

It is unfair: some people can eat whatever they want - and yet they do not gain weight. Image: Dmytro Flisak-fotolia

In order to investigate the brown fat in more detail, the Munich scientists had evaluated nearly 3,000 PET scans of 1644 patients. PET stands for positron emission tomography and is used in cancer medicine. With this method metabolic processes in the body can be made visible. Brown adipose tissue absorbs a lot of sugar, and this activity is reflected in the scans. The evaluation of the data has shown that the mass of brown fat is three times larger than assumed. This result is also of interest for drug discovery, as some anti-obesity and diabetes drugs activate brown adipose tissue. According to the authors in the "Journal of Nuclear Medicine", these preparations could have a stronger effect..

Another result was that the proportion of brown fat does not appear to be the same in every human being. Earlier studies had already shown that brown adipose tissue has a higher activity in women than in men. Younger people were also more active in brown fat and higher in proportion. In about five percent of subjects, active brown fat was much more common than in the general population, leading to higher energy expenditure and thus lower risk of overweight. This interesting field of research will continue to occupy science. Still, the backgrounds are not clear. It is believed that certain signal factors act simultaneously on the kidney and the brown fat.
Heike Kreutz, bzfe