Brown Fat Good, White Fat Bad

Obesity is a killer plain and simple. It’s thought to be the fifth leading risk of death in the world today, killing 2.8 million people globally every year. Not only is it deadly, on the way to the end it’ll destroy your health, your quality of life and ruin things that you love doing. It’s mocked in the media and people don’t take it nearly as seriously as they should do. With more awareness and more time put into combatting it obesity may start to diminish but for now it’s at epidemic proportions worldwide and countries like Canada are estimating as many as ¼ of their adult populations are obese!

Due to its prominence in the world today, obesity is a condition which is studied heavily worldwide. Any breakthrough in weight loss would help save millions of lives each year and potentially make the researcher and their company very wealthy. The obese population are a new and growing consumer base which companies and corporations are eager to cater to.

Scientists in Ottawa, Canada have found a way of triggering stem cells found in the muscles, turning them into brown fat. Not all fat is bad and though white fat is prone to inflammation, infection and all sorts of other unpleasant side effects, brown fat is actually good for you! Knowing how to trigger this change in muscle stem cells could well pave the way to causing this in others, the idea being to turn white fat into brown which would be much easier for a patient to get rid of.

This research is very new and scientists are still getting to the bottom of it. It’s a step in the right direction however and it’s only a matter of time before it could play a key role in ridding the world of this epidemic once and for all!