obesity tagged posts

Study of 50,000 people finds Brown Fat may Protect against Many Diseases

Brown fat scan
In these PET scans, the person on the left has abundant brown fat around the neck and cervical spine. The person on the right has no detectable brown fat.
(Courtesy of Andreas G. Wibmer and Heiko Schöder)

Brown fat is that magical tissue that you would want more of. Unlike white fat, which stores calories, brown fat burns energy and scientists hope it may hold the key to new obesity treatments. But it has long been unclear whether people with ample brown fat truly enjoy better health. For one thing, it has been hard to even identify such individuals since brown fat is hidden deep inside the body.

Now, a new study in Nature Medicine offers strong evidence: among over 52,000 participants, those who had detectable brown fat were less likely than their peers to suffer cardiac and metabo...

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Drug researcher develops ‘Fat Burning’ Molecule

Schematic showing key energy production pathways. Metabolites colour-coded by fold change of WD + BAM15 compared with WD, scale of twofold positive (red) to twofold negative (blue).

Scientists have recently identified a small mitochondrial uncoupler, named BAM15, that decreases the body fat mass of mice without affecting food intake and muscle mass or increasing body temperature.

Obesity affects more than 40 percent of adults in the United States and 13 percent of the global population. With obesity comes a variety of other interconnected diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and fatty liver disease, which makes the disease one of the most difficult — and most crucial — to treat.

“Obesity is the biggest health problem in the United States...

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Excess Coffee Consumption a Culprit for Poor Health

sick face on froth of coffee
Association between habitual coffee consumption and multiple disease outcomes: A Mendelian randomisation phenome-wide association study in the UK Biobank
Konstance Nicolopoulos, Anwar Mulugeta, Ang Zhou,Elina Hyppönen

Published:March 13, 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clnu.2020.03.009

Cappuccino, latte or short black, coffee is one of the most commonly consumed drinks in the world. But whether it’s good or bad for your health can be clarified by genetics, as a world-first study from the University of South Australia’s Australian Centre for Precision Health shows that excess coffee consumption can cause poor health.

Using data from over 300,000 participants in the UK Biobank, researchers examined connections between genetically instrumented habitual coffee consumption and a full ra...

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Brown Fat can Burn Energy in an unexpected way

FGF6 and FGF9 regulate UCP1 expression independent of brown adipogenesisNature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15055-9

Researchers have discovered an unexpected biological pathway by which brown fat cells can translate energy into heat. When we are exposed to sufficient cold or exercise, small clusters of brown fat cells in our bodies begin to burn up energy. Since 2009, when researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center and other institutions discovered that this helpful form of fat can be active in adults, scientists have sought to turn up the heat from these cells to treat obesity, diabetes and other metabolic conditions.

Researchers in the lab of Joslin’s Yu-Hua Tseng, PhD, a Senior Investigator in the Section on Integrative Physiology and Metabolism, now have dis...

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