While most people work hard to burn excess of body fat,researchers have come across a peculiar type of fat in adults which they might prefer to hold on to. This fat called ‘Brown Fat’ has a huge supply of mitochondria.Mitochondria are organelles that carry out their function by utilizing oxygen by burning sugar from the diet in order to produce heat,instead of storing energy as fat.In this way brown fat accelerate body metabolism and thus promote weight loss.New born babies use this fat to burn calories and keep warm because they cannot shiver.This fat however was thought to be absent in adults.But researchers at five Boston-area biomedical institutes have recently uncovered these fat in around the neck and collarbone in about 5 percent of the people examined through PET/CT scans. . Ronald Kahn, the head of obesity and hormone action research at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston reasons that this fat might be present in most adults but is in the inactive form.
In a similar study done by researchers from Finland and Sweden, adult volunteers were retained in cold rooms or subjected to ice-water footbaths to activate any brown fat that might be present. Follow-up PET/CT scans and biopsies then confirmed that the fat was indeed present. Meanwhile, researchers in the Netherlands documented that lean young men have more brown fat than their overweight counterparts.