The findings, published today in the journal Cell, sheds light on how white fat, which is stored by the body, can be turned into brown fat, which burns off white fat.
“In mice we have been able to show how to instruct the brain to convert white fat into brown fat so that the animals don’t put on weight even when they are fed a high fat diet, which is very exciting,” Professor Tony Tiganis said.
Finding a solution to the obesity epidemic was vital to slowing increasing rates of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer, he said.
“We don’t know what is driving the obesity epidemic, but we do know it results from the energy imbalance when the amount of calories we consume exceed the energy we use.”
His team discovered how two hormones work together to give the brain a picture of how much fat is in the body, triggering the energy burning process.
The hormones are leptin, which helps measure fat reserves and insulin, which gives the brain an indication of future fat reserves.
“The brain then turns this information into signals through the nervous system that promotes the conversion of white fat, which stores energy, into brown fat, which burns fat,” Prof Tiganis said.
He said one reason people gain weight could be that this mechanism was failing.
“One reason for that appears to be that if there are increased levels of two enzymes they turn off the leptin and insulin signalling and the brain does not instruct the body to convert the fat.”
This would result in the body storing fat rather than burning it.
Prof Tiganis found that in mice that lack these two enzymes the leptin and insulin signalling was not switched off and the animals had high levels of brown fat, low weight and were diabetes resistant.
“Eventually we think we may be able to help people lose weight by targeting these two enzymes,” Prof Tiganis said.
But he warned that developing a drug that replicated the results of their laboratory studies was still many years away.
Share This:
