Scientists
at The University of Nottingham believe they’ve found a way of fighting
obesity—with a pioneering technique which uses thermal imaging. This
heat-seeking technology is being used to trace our reserves of brown
fat—the body’s “good fat”—which plays a key role in how quickly our body
can burn calories as energy.
This
special tissue known as brown adipose tissue, or brown fat, produces
300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body. Potentially the
more brown fat we have the less likely we are to lay down excess energy
or food as white fat.
Michael
Symonds, professor of Developmental Physiology in the School of
Clinical Sciences, led a team of scientists and doctors at The
University of Nottingham who have pioneered the thermal imaging process
so we can assess how much brown fat we’ve got and how much heat it is
producing. Their research has just been published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
Thermogenic index for food labels
“Potentially
the more brown fat you have or the more active your brown fat is you
produce more heat and as a result you might be less likely to lay down
excess energy or food as white fat,” said Symonds.
“This
completely non-invasive technique could play a crucial role in our
fight against obesity. Potentially we could add a thermogenic index to
food labels to show whether that product would increase or decrease heat
production within brown fat. In other words whether it would speed up
or slow down the amount of calories we burn.”
The obesity threat
Obesity
is one of the biggest challenges we face in Europe and America as our
children grow older. It affects 155 million children worldwide. In the
UK the number of overweight children doubled in the 1990s.
“Babies
have a larger amount of brown fat which they use up to keep warm soon
after birth making our study’s finding that this healthy fat can also
generate heat in childhood and adolescence very exciting,” said Dr.
Helen Budge, Clinical Associate Professor and Reader in Neonatology,
said.
Professor
Symonds and his team say their ground-breaking research could lead to a
better understanding of how brown fat balances the energy from the food
we eat with the energy our bodies actually use up.
Professor
Symonds, together with Budge and their team from the University’s
School of Clinical Sciences has shown that the neck region in healthy
children produces heat. With the help of local school children they
found that this region, which is known to contain brown adipose tissue,
rapidly switches on to produce heat. This capacity is much greater in
young children compared with adolescents and adults. The researchers are
now using their findings to explore interventions designed to promote
energy use as heat and, thus, prevent excess weight gain in both
children and adults.
New non-invasive technology
“Using
our imaging technique we can locate brown fat and assess its capacity
to produce heat. It avoids harmful techniques which use radiation and
enables detailed studies with larger groups of people. This may provide
new insights into the role of brown fat in how we balance energy from
the food we eat, with the energy our bodies use up,” said Symonds.
Source: University of Nottingham