Losing weight can be tricky, but scientists may have finally found a way to do it: a cheat code for burning calories without exercising or changing your diet. And it all comes down to a fat-burning mechanism you already have in your body, known as “beige fat.”
Of course, exercise and diet remain two of the most important factors. But a team of researchers from the University of San Francisco in the United States has discovered a way to transform ordinary white fat cells into beige fat cells.
Although these two terms seem like two sides of the same coin, there is a difference. Many mammals, including humans, have three types of fat cells: white, brown, and beige. White cells store calories to produce energy, brown cells burn energy to release heat, and beige cells combine both functions.
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By changing from white to beige, the body could actually burn fat cells naturally without help.
Although this discovery is based on tests in mice, it could lead to the development of a new class of weight-loss drugs and even explain why clinical trials of related therapies have not been successful.
Researchers have long believed that creating beige fat requires starting with stem cells. The new study, published in the Clinical Research Journaldemonstrated that ordinary white fat cells can be transformed into beige fat simply by limit the production of a certain protein known as KLF-15.
“A lot of people thought it wasn’t feasible,” he said. Brian FeldmanProfessor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California and lead author of the study. “We’ve shown not only that this approach works to turn these white fat cells into beige cells, but also that the bar to achieve this is not as high as we thought.”
KLF-15 plays a role in fat cell metabolism and function. Feldman and his team studied how the protein works in mice, which retain brown fat throughout their lives. They found that KLF-15 was much less abundant in white fat cells than in brown or beige fat cells.
The team bred mice with white fat cells lacking KLF-15 and found that these mice transformed the cells from white to beige. Not only were they able to make this change, but without the protein, the default setting became beige.
So why does the KLF-15 protein have this effect? Using cultured human fat cells, the team discovered that the protein controls the abundance of a receptor called Adrb1, which helps maintain natural energy balances.
Previous research has used drugs to target the similar Adrb3 receptor in mice. This led to weight loss in mice, but human trials have had disappointing results.
According to the team, a drug targeting the Adrb1 receptor is much more likely to be effective and could have advantages over current weight-loss drugs, including fewer side effects and longer-lasting effects.
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