Brown Fat Keeps Me Skinny In Hot Texas

I found out this morning why I stay so skinny while eating so much. I spend a lot of time cold, like this morning, despite Dr. Layla's no swim orders, I was back in the pool for a long time.

The water in the pool is maybe 60 degrees, give or take a degree or two. By the time I'm out I am chilled to my core. It's an hour later and I'm still sort of in shiver mode.

Well, today the results of 3 groups of researchers are appearing in The New England Journal of Medicine. And what were they researching you are wondering? Brown fat.

For 3 decades scientists have been studying brown fat, due to the brown fat cells acting like a calorie consuming furnace, with the furnace triggered by cold temperatures.

It was previously thought that human babies had brown fat because during infancy babies are unable to shiver their muscles to stay warm. The operating assumption had been that human babies lost the brown fat when their muscles developed sufficiently to trigger the shiver response.

Now, the researchers have discovered that humans continue to have brown fat cells past infancy. Skinny people have more brown fat cells than fat people, the younger you are the more brown fat cells you have. Women have more than men.

The brown fat cells are brown because they are filled with mitochondria, with mitochondria containing iron, thus causing the brownish color.

This new info explains a lot of things. Like why on average people in the South are way fatter than people up north. Up north you shiver way more than you do here in the warm South. Remember last summer when I spent a winter shivering in icy Tacoma and was surprised I did not gain any weight, especially with all the extra feedings I was forced to consume? Well, now it makes sense to me. I had very few breaks from shivering when I was up there. My poor long-suffering brown fat cells were working overtime.

Just like they are right now as I type and shiver. I suppose I could put a shirt on and try to put a stop to this out of control calorie burning I've got happening right now.

Any of you tubbies reading this, you might not have as many brown fat cells as I do, due to that tubby thing you've got going on. But, you might want to try getting real cold for a period of time, every day, and see if you can melt off some of that lard. It's worth a try. Then again, I don't know if the cold pool option would work for an obese person due to all that insulating adipose tissue keeping the cold from being able to reach whatever brown fat cells you might have.