A study has revealed that transplanting brown fat, also known as 'good' fat, may help to curb obesity and prevent diabetes. Scientists have discovered that transplanting fat could hold key to weight loss.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's thought adding the right type of fat to the body could speed up calorie burning and improve conditions such as diabetes, the Daily Mail reported.
The theory is that there are two types of fat in the body. One is the much-dreaded white fat, which sits under the skin and gives us that beer belly or wobbly thighs. It's caused by eating too much.
But we also have a smaller amount of brown fat, which generates heat. It does this by boosting the metabolism, burning large amounts of energy so the body starts to burn up the "white fat."
When "switched on" it is said to produce around 300 times more heat than any other organ in the body.
Previous research has shown that some people - generally lean types - have more brown fat than others. This could help explain why they remain a healthy weight without much effort, while others struggle to lose weight.
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But scientists at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston have now taken this one step further by actually transplanting brown fat to see if it can combat obesity.
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They also found that the transplanted brown fat also secreted hormones which controlled the body's metabolism.
The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Source-ANI