Brown Fat
Use the word ‘fat’ in any conversation with a woman… yes, the mere mention of good fat (where the word ‘fat’ is used as a noun as opposed to its common usage in the adjective form) such as brown fat and you’ll find the conversation taking an ugly, self-deprecating turn consisting of phrases such as: I’m fat… I need to exercise… I need to go on a diet… I need to eat less… I’m a vegetarian… and so on and so forth.
And while I sit there pretending to listen, I wonder while trying very hard (and I mean, very) to pay attention and be sensitive: F***, why me?
I also make a futile attempt to change the topic to soothe the young one’s troubled mind in order to cater to one of her numerous ‘unspoken needs’ involving the use of one of my many talents: mind reading!
Er… sorry, what I meant was I tune out completely. Sanity and confinement, as they say, is the last refuge of the ‘single’ man.
Yet I do have a soft corner for the ‘fairer sex’ despite the blathering nonsense while I play the ‘agony aunt’ in purging their deepest fears of obesity… ok, I’m going to stop here ‘cause the internal dialogue in my head is going: More woman for me!
So, since I’ve been a pig for sometime now, let me redeem myself by demystifying the ‘fat’ word that will alleviate the pain and misery of many a fair damsel, and the psychological trauma and scarring that their potential or current soul mate can do without!
First, not all fat is bad for you. There’s good fat and there’s bad fat. Good enough? OK, let’s move on…
Second, you need to consume 30% of the right kind of fat daily as fat acts as fuel for the body; helps build hormones, absorbs particular vitamins and insulates the nervous tissue in the body.
Third, unsaturated fat and essential fatty acids can be safely classified as ‘good fat’ while trans-fatty acids and nutrition containing saturated fat are ‘bad fats’.
So, the idea here is not to deprive your body of ‘fat’ completely, but to ensure that you consume nutrition that contains ‘good fats’ as mentioned above.
So, while you digest these facts for now, let’s take this up a notch by discussing ‘brown fat’ as opposed to the ‘white fat’ that we’ve looked at so far.
I’m sure you’d remember Morpheus in The Matrix talking about babies reduced into the equivalent of Duracell batteries? It’s not all that fictitious actually.
Well, in the real world, brown fat makes up 5% of the total body mass in children and mammals that hibernate in order to create heat and prevent hypothermia, which is a major cause of death in children.
Who knows, that might have just been what Morpheus was referring to!
Now, brown fat contains mitochondria, the cellular power plants as we studied in school, (unless you aren’t smarter than a 5th grader) which disappear as we grow, thus burning this brown fat (which shares the same embryological origin to skeletal muscle) to generate heat when we feel very cold, converting it into the white fat that we have all come to dislike and consider a detriment to our effort to stay lean.
Scientists say that ‘brown fat’ might be the key to successfully helping people lose weight in the future once they figure out how to turn these dormant brown cells into active fat-burning cells other than staying cold which is the only way by which one can activate these cells by default.
Infants have brown fat mostly as a sheet of cells covering their backs while for adult humans it is present in the upper back, on the side of the neck, in the dip between the collarbone and shoulder, and along the spine. Women as well as people who are lean are said to have more brown fat activity than their male or fatter counterparts.
So, if this idea of eating what you want and then burning it off by sitting in a place that has a chilly temperature helps in reducing obesity… well, why not?… since the idea of using drugs to stimulate brown fat are still not considered safe enough yet.
In summary, while scientists find a way to help you reduce white fat apart from the unconventional way by increasing the brown fat in your body, conventional methods of diet (involving “good white fats”) and exercise can be adopted for now.
How much brown fat do you have?
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