A report in today’s New England Journal of Medicine says reasearchers have found indications nearly every adult has little blobs of brown fat that can burn huge numbers of calories when activated by the cold. Leslie P. Kozak, a professor of molecular genetics at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, put mice in a 41-degree room for a week. Kozak told the New York Times the mice lost 14% of their body weight while eating a high-fat, high-calorie diet. Kozak and other researchers hope to find safe ways to turn on people’s brown fat, allowing them to burn more calories. This would be the first obesity drug to affect energy expenditure instead of appetite, says Dr. Claude Bouchard, head of Pennington. Read the full story here.
This story has been updated since it was first published
