“Brown WHAT???” my best friend screams at me.
“Brown fat…”
He cuts me off before I can explain. So, putting a symbolic sock in his mouth, tying him up, and propping them up on the couch under 150 pounds of Pyrenean Mountain Dog in his lap, licking his face with a tongue as wide as my hand, I begin in lecture mode: “Brown fat burns energy instead of storing it. Because it burns calories to make heat, researchers are studying it to see how it might help with metabolism and weight management.”
Dr. Greg J. Morton found that these cells use large amounts of glucose to drive this heat production, thus serving as a potential way to lower blood sugar, a key goal for any diabetes treatment. Dr. Morton is working to understand what role the brain plays in turning these brown fat cells on and off.”
OK – I have brown fat. Everyone does. The difference is that brown fat actually generates heat instead of storing heat. WHITE fat CAN be used to generate heat. Adult humans have more white fat than brown fat. White adipose tissue (aka FLAB) dominates the body's energy storage, representing nearly all of standard below-the-skin and external (like my fat belly and flabby lower arms, and double chin) deposits.
Why the difference? Newborns have about 2% to 5% of total body weight as brown fat because babies can’t shiver yet, and shivering generates heat. When they reach the teen years, brown fat naturally decreases as a person grows, until at adulthood, a person has between 0.02 and 300 grams total though some specialized imaging studies estimate brown and beige fat combined may represent up to roughly 10% of total fat depending on cold exposure and individual genetics.
OK – now we know WHY fat is important and there’s a difference between storing white fat (in case I get marooned on Iceland in the middle of winter) and I weight like five pounds and get chilled on a warm summer day) – and I don’t have to shiver like a baby just to stay warm on a warm summer day using – the brown fat!
Research needs to be done on the “Brown Adipose T (BAT)-batokine axis.”!
“In Type 2, this BAT-batokine activity is downregulated which promotes insulin resistance!! It needs to be stimulated. We need to break this circle through new therapies that INCREASE BAT-batokine activity and improve glucose and fat regulation but also have potential for organ-specific therapeutic benefits, including in the heart, lung, kidney, and liver. This would also reduce white fat deposits while preserving or even increasing muscle mass and function due to the therapeutic effects being independent of negative energy balance.
The BAT-batokine axis has finally come of age. Such new therapies would help to lower obesity and multiple other chronic conditions. Rather than JUST weight loss or improving the control of blood sugars, the therapies might create a variety of holistic therapeutic benefits not just in treating diabetes, but on key organs essential for metabolic efficiency and flexibility.”
Who knows WHAT’S JUST AROUND THE CORNER?
Links: https://diabetes.org/research/type-2-diabetes-research-glance,
https://joslin.org/news-stories/all-news-stories/news/2026/04/study-uncovers-3d-dna-switch-in-brown-fat, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/endocrinology/articles/10.3389/fendo.2026.1949288/full, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9165237/
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