Brown fat can burn calories

 What does it take to burn off the extra weight that puts so many people at risk of type 2 diabetes and related diseases?
 How about just turning down the thermostat—can a cool room burn off a handful of chocolate candy or a side of French fries?
 That’s one question Joslin researchers are asking as they follow up on their 2009 discovery of energy-burning brown fat in adults.
 Brown fat works opposite to white fat. White fat infamously stores extra calories as overflowing bellies, muffin tops, love handles and plump thighs. In neat contrast, brown fat expends energy in the form of heat. That’s very handy for maintaining body temperature in newborns, but brown fat takes up so little space that until recently most doctors believed adults had none.
 Joslin’s C. Ronald Kahn, M.D., Aaron Cypess, M.D., Ph.D., and their colleagues looked for brown fat in the radiology scans of adults who had undergone the testing for other reasons. They found small collections of brown fat in the neck and around the collarbones that tended to show up in younger, leaner adults examined in cooler seasons, while these collections were not seen in older, obese individuals. Women had detectable brown fat twice as often as men. Other papers published in the same issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and elsewhere since then have confirmed and extended these original observations. In the desperate search for more effective tools to combat the twin epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes, the surprising possibilities of brown fat represent a potential metabolic bonanza.

  There are simple natural techniques that can be utilized to help the body develop more brown fat.