Can fat make you thin?

Today Harvard Medical School researchers announced that brown fat can make you lose weight.

It seems that there are two different types of adipose tissue: white fat and brown fat. The white fat sits around because it is very lazy and stuffing itself on triglycerides. But brown fat! Oh my goodness! Brown fat has get up and go!

Quoting from the original article at Wired Science: Scientists Make a Fat-Burning Fat:

Brown fat is quite different. It’s full of mitochondria — the body’s energy-producing cellular machines — and burns calories to produce heat.

Abundant in babies, whom it helps keep warm, brown fat is found only in traces in adults. But with a flick of two genetic switches, scientists showed that cells destined to become muscle have the potential to become brown fat.

Emphasis mine.

Asked whether his technique could deprive the body of muscle, Spiegelman said that precursor muscle cells are self-replenishing: Redirect a few into brown fat, and they’ll be quickly replaced.

This is extremely preliminary research but they are showing that:

They are years, perhaps decades, away from research that could turn this into a prescription pill. And of course it might not ever come to that. This is all very new and they are still very far from animal testing.

I find all of this research fascinating and I love knowing more about how the human body works.

But.

Things that freak the crap out of me on this brown fat research.

Edit: men-in-full makes this very important observation in her comment:

Something else to think about – the brain IIRC is “white fat,” stuffed with cholesterol & triglycerides. What if some of that genetic manipulation “leaks” into the brain, and messes with brain fat?

Sounds like a losing proposition to me.

Links to the two Nature articles available online by the Harvard team: Nature: PRDM16 controls a brown fat/skeletal muscle switch, and Nature: New role of bone morphogenetic protein 7 in brown adipogenesis and energy expenditure. A synopsis of each article is available but to read the articles in full will require either a login (if you or your company subscribes) or a payment of $32.00.