Researchers have discovered that "brown" fat helps to keep you thin, by turning the energy obtained from food into heat and burning up calories without physical exertion. 50g of brown fat burns 500 calories per day.The more brown fat a person has, the thinner they are. Unfortunately, brown fat seems to dwindle with age, making us prone to gaining weight the older we get.
Experiments are being done in which white fat is extracted via liposuction, converted to brown fat by being treated with BMP-7 and then reimplanted into the original donor.
Other methods of increasing brown fat involve turning on the command gene that switches cells into brown fat as they develop.
