Usually we don't fancy the cold. In the winter we put on sweaters and turn up the heating to keep our bodies warm. Brown fat has become lazy because we protect ourselves from the cold. As a baby you need that brown fat, but because of the lack of use it disappears. Fortunately, you can activate it again through cold.
What is brown fat?
Our body contains white and brown fat. White fat is unhealthy and if you are overweight there is too much of it in your body. Brown fat is healthy and we generally have too little of that. Brown fat converts energy, stored in sugars and white fat, into warmth. An additional benefit; it also burns some of the excess fat in our body! Brown fat works as a heater for your body. The energy sources in brown fat that are responsible for combustion are known as mitochondria. You may wonder why it's called brown fat, it's because this kind of fat has a darker color on scans.
Good for your health
By converting energy into warmth, brown fat prevents our body from converting too much energy into white fat. Brown fat also burns the white fat that our body has already stored. Brown fat can even help against obesity. Research has shown that brown fat lowers cholesterol.
Not only babies have brown fat
For a long time it was thought that only babies had brown fat cells and that they would eventually disappear. But adults alsof have brown fat. Researchers in Maastricht were the first to publish about this in the scientific journal The New England Journal of Medicine. They discovered that overweight people had less active brown fat than people who were not overweight. This is because our ability to withstand the cold has become lazy.
Activate brown fat with an ice bath
Cold activates brown fat. By consciously spending more time in a cold environment, you can reactivate your brown fat. There are some easy ways to do that:- Wear less warm clothes;
- Turn the heating down a few degrees;
- Take a cold shower in the morning;
- Take an ice bath.
