A new approach to treating obesity has been opened up by a discovery about how the body creates brown fat, the cells that burn white fat and turn it into body heat.
Researchers led by Bruce M. Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School report their discovery in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. Their paper describes the natural system by which brown fat cells are generated from their precursors.
Dr. Spiegelman has used this system — a pair of proteins that switch on the brown fat cell’s distinctive genes — to convert both mouse and human skin cells into brown fat cells.
Brown fat cells have a very different role from the better-known white fat cells. The white cells store fat; the brown cells burn it off as heat.
