Beige fat

We’ve all spent time and effort on pointless tasks so we look busy when the boss walks past. But now scientists have discovered a new type of fat cell in the body that does the same thing, burning energy and producing heat with pointless busywork.

By suppressing one protein, stores of white fat can switch to calorie-burning beige fat, in a feat that so far has eluded scientists working in this field. This means long-lasting weight loss without the brain-gut side effects of existing obesity drugs.

In a major breakthrough, scientists have identified a key protein involved in producing brown fat, and found it can even help form these cells in 'bad' white fat. This now opens the door to new weight-loss treatments that have long eluded researchers.

Finding the molecular key to turn fat tissue from white to brown has huge potential for weight loss, yet the cellular code has been a hard one to crack. Scientists are now one step closer, finding a way in to manipulate the tricky white fat cells.

Scientists in China have identified a new mechanism by which the immune system boosts the production of fat in one of its favorable forms, with experiments demonstrating how it can be leveraged to prevent obesity and diabetes in susceptible mice.

Much research into obesity of late has focused on ways they body might be made to produce more brown fat rather than white as a way of fighting weight gain, and scientists have now made a key advance in this area.

In 2012, researchers opened up a promising new avenue in the pursuit of advanced treatments for obesity with the discovery of "beige fat." A study has now uncovered an immune cell that activates this form of fat in mice.

Researchers have found that blocking the uptake of a specific hormone prompts the burning of stores of beige fat in mice. The researchers say this regulatory mechanism provides a new target for the development of drugs that combat obesity by boosting the burning of stored fat in the human body.