Fat burning ‘default’ switch?

You have no doubt heard of the latest weight loss craze known as GLP-1 inhibitors.

From Ozempic to Wegovy and Mounjaro, these drugs have taken the nation by storm with more and more celebrities — including the past poster girl for Weight Watchers, Oprah herself — admitting to using them to drop huge amounts of weight fast.

However, there’s an absolute mountain of evidence building showing that just like with so many medications that might at first seem like wonder drugs, these GLP-1 medications are not all they’re cracked up to be.

They’ve been linked to pancreatitis, gastroparesis and bowel obstruction. And they can come with extremely frustrating weight loss plateaus and almost inevitable rebound weight gain.

Luckily, according to a group of scientists from the University of California San Francisco, there may be a far better, more natural option in the works that can help you go from weight problems to slim and trim.

And it works by turning bad white fat into a calorie-burning beige machine.

Here are the details…

The good, the bad and the better for burning fat

While most of us have heard that there are different colors of fat in our bodies — white, beige and brown — many of us lump the brown and the beige together causing some confusion when it comes to their role in our weight.

So here’s a quick primer on our three types of fat.

The first, white fat, serves as an energy reserve for your body. It’s also the fat you see when you look in your mirror that collects like a muffin top or unsightly lumps around your abdomen, hips and thighs.

On the other hand, brown fat cells are the ones that burn energy to release heat, which helps maintain body temperature.  It’s the kind that we would all like to have more of since burning energy means burning calories.

However, our brown fat disappears after our first year of life. And that’s the third type of fat, beige fat, comes in…

Beige fat cells combine the characteristics of white and brown fat. They burn energy just like brown fat, but unlike brown fat cells, which grow in clusters, beige fat cells are embedded throughout white fat deposits. 

Also unlike brown fat cells, it’s possible for beige fat can form throughout your life. You just need to encourage its production.

In labs, scientists do this using stem cells, which sounds great on the surface. But stem cells are rare and stem cell therapy is costly enough to be out of bounds for the majority of us.

So to solve the problem, those University of California researchers set out to find a switch that could be flipped to turn white fat cells directly into beige ones. 

The protein answer

They found the answer in a protein called KLF-15, which plays a role in metabolism and the function of fat cells. 

By analyzing the protein, the team discovered that KLF-15 was much less abundant in white fat cells than in brown or beige fat cells.  They found that when they bred mice with white fat cells that lacked KLF-15, the mice converted them from white to beige.

Not only could the fat cells switch from one form into another, but without the protein, the default setting appeared to be beige. 

So they decided to test their work in human fat cells…

By culturing human fat cells, the team was able to show that the protein controls the abundance of a receptor called Adrb1, which helps maintain energy balance. And they now believe that producing a drug that specifically targets that receptor, could allow for significant weight loss, without the side effects of GLP-1 drugs.

That’s because its activity would be limited to fat deposits, rather than affecting the brain like those drugs do.

Even better, the scientists believe that the effects of such a drug would be long-lasting because fat cells are relatively long-lived. 

Turning your white fat beige

Of course, the lead researcher also pointed out, “We’re certainly not at the finish line, but we’re close enough that you can clearly see how these discoveries could have a big impact on treating obesity.”

That means the drug is not yet available to help those of us ready to lose weight now. But I’m not going to leave you hanging til then…

It’s not only possible but easy to encourage the browning of your white fat — with a few tricks science has shown to work…

These include:

• Taking flavonols – Flavanols have the power to activate fat browning via the sympathetic nervous system.
• Going BATTY – Studies show that cold exposure results in BAT (brown adipose tissue) activation.
• Adding in vitamin A – Additional research found that when vitamin A was increased along with cold exposure white fat was converted into brown fat, with higher rates of metabolic activity, energy consumption and fat burning.
• Supplementing with nutritional oils – A supplement combo of natural oils has been proven to not only reduce lipid droplet size to shrink fat cells but also increase hallmarks of beige adipocytes in cell culture so that more brown fat is created.

You can start with just one or try all four options to really take your body’s conversion of white fat to beige to the next level.

Sources:

Scientists turn white fat cells into calorie-burning beige fat — EurekAlert!