Mull this over: Berry compound helps you burn fat

When it comes to fat, there’s one kind you want more of — brown fat.

Brown fat is healthy fat that causes your body to burn more calories. In fact, it’s main purpose in your body is to keep your body warm by burning calories to generate heat.

That’s why when you’re cold and start shivering, your body converts white fat into brown fat.

Now, brown fat is in short supply in most bodies. There may be a little bit in your neck and shoulders. But white fat is the predominant form of fat in your body — that’s the fat you’ll find on your stomach, hips, butt, thighs and pretty much everywhere else. It’s also the fat that puts you at risk for serious health problems like diabetes, heart disease and cancer. So the question is…

How do you get more of the healthy, calorie-burning brown fat and less of the unhealthy, disease-causing white fat?

Well, like I mentioned earlier your body converts white fat into brown fat when you’re cold. So you could turn your thermostat way down this winter to make more easy-burning brown fat. But luckily, there’s also a much more comfortable way to do it…

Chinese researchers recently identified a supplement that could activate brown fat in your body, increase your metabolism and help you lose weight.

The supplement is rutin, a flavonoid extracted from the mulberry plant. Researchers from the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences gave rutin to obese mice and found that it helped them convert white fat into brown fat, burn more calories and lose weight.

Will these results translate to humans? That’s hard to say. But if you want to give rutin a try it couldn’t hurt. In fact, it has other benefits that could boost your overall health, like improving your circulation, fighting inflammation — and researchers also believe converting your white fat to brown fat could play a big role in helping you avoid diabetes.

But if you decide to take a rutin supplement, you should know, it won’t necessarily come from the mulberry plant like the rutin in the study. Rutin is found in other plants too like buckwheat, citrus fruits and black tea. So I would recommend getting your rutin from a mulberry leaf extract supplement or (better yet) fresh, whole mulberries. If you do, you’ll also get a healthy dose of cancer-killing vitamin C, vitamin A, potassium, calcium, iron and the anti-aging muscle booster, resveratrol, too.

Sources:

1. “What Is Brown Fat? 5 Fascinating Facts.” Live Science. http://www.livescience.com. Retrieved October 26, 2016.

2. “What’s the Difference Between White Fat and Brown Fat?” Women’s Health. http://www.womenshealthmag.com. Retrieved October 26, 2016.

3. Yuan, et al. “Rutin ameliorates obesity through brown fat activation.” The FASEB Journal, 2016.

4. “Health Benefits of Mulberries.” Organic Facts. https://www.organicfacts.net. Retrieved October 26, 2016.

5. Cypess, A. M., & Kahn, C. R. (2010). Brown fat as a therapy for obesity and diabetes. Current Opinion in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Obesity, 17(2), 143–149. http://doi.org/10.1097/MED.0b013e328337a81f