Sugar-burning fat cell may help with weight loss

Photo: AFP

We all think that fat cells are bad and should try to lose weight (shed fat) to stay fit and healthy and, as some people say, “good looking”. There are actually two types of fat cells and scientists have discovered a sub-type from one of them that might actually burn glucose.

In an article published in Nature.com December 19 titled ‘Fat cells with a sweet tooth’, the work of some scientists at the University of California explains what they found.

We generally think that fat stores energy in our body. It does this in the form of lipids. The scientists found that this is actually done by white fat cells but they looked at a second type of brown cells that actually burns energy. These sub-type of brown cells burn energy to produce heat to let us keep our bodies warm. Imagine the Eskimos living in Alaska.

The scientists suggest that if we could activate this “thermogenic” fat we could tackle obesity. The scientists wrote that the thermogenic fat cell was discovered to burn mainly sugar rather than the sugar-lipids combination.

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These thermogenic fat cells are brown or beige and you will find them mixed with your white fat cells. Extreme cold weather triggers the production of beige fat cells in white-fat tissue depots.

They note that while a lot of effort has been made into developing drugs targeting thermogenic fat for weight loss, it is difficult because people don’t have the same levels of the beige fat cells. Your number of brown fat cells also go down with age. The scientists saw the growth of brown fat cells in mice when they were given a certain drug to block certain receptors and exposed to extreme cold.

The scientists found that this subset of beige fat differs from that of conventional beige fat. The subset expresses higher levels of many genes involved in sugar and carbohydrate metabolism and glycolysis — the process by which energy is produced from glucose.  These types of cells may do different things while managing metabolism.

Article source: https://www.samaa.tv/culture/2018/12/sugar-burning-fat-cell-may-help-with-weight-loss/