Fat that makes you Thin

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.

Drugs That Block Blood Vessel Growth May Help Obesity

Zafgen, a biopharmaceutical startup based in Cambridge, MA, is attacking obesity the way that cancer researchers have been attacking tumors for decades: using drugs that interfere with its blood supply.
The fat cells that make up adipose tissue can't grow without blood vessels to nourish them. Zafgen, a startup based in Cambridge, MA, is developing obesity drugs that starve fat tissue by blocking blood-vessel proliferation. These drugs, which were originally designed to halt tumor growth, cause dramatic weight loss in obese mice.