Not all the fat that our body contains is bad for health. There is also good or healthy. The good helps burn calories, while the bad causes the body to store calories, which contributes to weight gain and obesity . But in recent research carried out with mice, a scientific team at the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis (United States) has found a method to convert white fat – bad – into good brown fat . The results of the study, published in the journal Cell Reports , open the door to the possibility of developing more effective treatments against obesity and diabetes in humans.
White fat is located in the belly, hips and thighs , where it stores calories and produces the obnoxious love handles. In contrast, brown fat, which is found around the neck and shoulders, burns calories through a process that generates heat. The American researchers discovered that if the activity of a specific protein in white fat is blocked, it begins to transform into beige fat, a type of lipid between white and brown. Blocking the protein to create beige fat caused the fat cells to heat up and burn calories.
According to Irfan J. Lodhi, professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Lipid Research of the aforementioned university and lead author of the study, his “objective is to find a method to treat or prevent obesity . This research suggests that, if We target a protein contained in white fat, we can convert the bad fat into another capable of fighting obesity. “
The presence of beige fat in adult humans was discovered in 2015 and although it is practically an intermediate state between white and brown, Lodhi thinks that it works more like brown fat and that it can protect against obesity. So far his team has carried out a series of experiments with mice that consisted of creating a genetic strain of these rodents that did not make a key protein called PexRAP in white fat cells . This made the mice more beige fat and leaner than their littermates, even though they ate the same amount of food as other mice. They also burned more calories.
According to Lodhi, “Mice normally have very low levels of the PexRAP protein in brown fat. When we put them in a cold environment, the levels of this protein were also reduced in white fat, which made the fat behave more as brown fat. The cold induced brown and beige fats to burn stored energy and produce heat. “
When the researchers blocked the PexRAP protein in the animals, they turned the white fat into a beige one capable of burning calories. Lodhi believes that if the PexRAP protein could be safely locked into white fat cells in humans, it would be possible to lose weight more easily.
The challenge will be to find a reliable and safe method to achieve this without causing the individual to be treated to increase in temperature and suffer from fever. Drug designers have a job ahead of them. More than 60% of adults in the United States are overweight or obese, and about 30 million people have diabetes. If this study succeeds and the therapies developed from it could help turn bad fat into good fat, those numbers could be lowered.
