'Brown fat' could help reduce obesity
Updated
Scientists in the United States say they have devised a recipe for making fat that is good for the body, and hope it will lead to new treatments for diabetes and obesity.
Presenter: Meredith Griffiths
Speakers: Bruce Spiegelman, Harvard Medical School Professor
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MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: While it's long been known that body fat stores energy and keeps people warm, recently it's been shown that humans have significant deposits of brown fat, which works differently from the more common white fat cells.
Harvard Medical School Professor Bruce Spiegelman explains the difference.
BRUCE SPIEGELMAN: White fat cells are specialised to store excess energy in the body and brown fat cells are specialised to dissipate or to burn excess energy stored in the body by generating heat and it's a defence against cold and obesity.
MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Professor Spiegelman and his team hope to work out ways to help people minimise their white fat cells and maximise the brown cells.
BRUCE SPIEGELMAN: At this point what we know based essentially, mostly on work done in rodents is that chronic cold exposure increases the amount of brown fat.
MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: But the team have now been able to create brown fat cells.
They took connective tissue from mouse and human skin and added a couple of specific proteins.
BRUCE SPIEGELMAN: We studied and found the gene control factors that control normal brown fat development, and then we could, having found that, we could put these into connective tissue cells and reprogram them to become brown fat cells.
MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: And then were those cells then injected back into the mice
BRUCE SPIEGELMAN: Yes they were.
MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: And what was the effect?
BRUCE SPIEGELMAN: Well we just showed in this paper that they look like brown fat and they function to take up glucose from the blood, we didn't actually inject enough by mass to affect the physiology of the animal; that wasn't the goal of this study.
MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Is that one of the next steps though, of this kind research?
BRUCE SPIEGELMAN: It is indeed. Yes.
MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Professor Spiegelman says it's hoped that increasing a person's amount of brown fat cells will prevent or reverse obesity.
BRUCE SPIEGELMAN: Basically brown fat dissipates chemical energy and obesity is really a disorder of an excess of energy storage, so increasing the amount of brown fat would be expected to increase the amount of energy expenditure and the amount of chemical energy that's burned away, that's used up.
MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: He says trials of injecting brown fat cells into humans could begin in three to five years.
