Here's a new and compelling reason not to starve
yourself: A study recently published in the journal Cell shows that the brain
can actually listen and respond to fullness singals by turning white fat (the
unhealthy stuff that ups your risk for heart disease and diabetes) into brown
fat (the good-for-you fat that helps your body burn calories).
When researchers at the Yale School of Medicine
studied the behavior of hunger-regulating neurons in the brains of mice, they
found that the hunger and appetite signals act on brain neurons to control fat
browning. Eating too few calories (unsurprisingly) caused hunger in the mice,
which prevented white fat from turning brown. But eating a normal,
hunger-satisfying amount of calories encouraged the browning of white fat, and
actually kept the mice from gaining weight.
MORE: How To (Really) Lose Belly Fat After 40
This isn’t the first study to look at how brown fat
works. Research published earlier this year discovered that exposure to mildly
cold temperatures also spurs brown fat production and helps the body burn more
calories in an attempt to produce heat and stay warm. But now, experts know
where brown fat actually comes from in the first place. “It’s actually eating
that encourages white fat to turn brown. If you eat, you promote heat
production,” says lead study author Xiaoyong Yang, PhD.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes a lot of
sense. If food is scarce—as it often was during the caveman days, your body
burns fewer calories to save valuable energy. Once food becomes abundant and
you start eating more, the calorie-burning can pick up, too.
The question, of course, is how to find the right
balance between eating enough to encourage fat-browning, but not so much that
you gain weight. So far experts can’t offer a magic number of calories to aim
for, since more research is needed to see how hunger and appetite cause white
fat to brown in humans. Still, it’s probably not a bad idea to nix behaviors
like overeating followed by crash dieting. “Those habits could wear out your
brain’s capacity to control fat burning,” Yang says. And nobody wants that,
right?
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