What if you actually had a type of fat cell in your body that made you skinnier?
I know, sounds like a dream, right?
Turns out that, in fact, all fat is not equal.
That we have different types of fat cells, adipose tissue in our body, and one particular type stores energy, plumping us up.
The other type actually burns energy pretty fiercely, making us leaner and also regulating things like glucose in our body and all sorts of other things that would be super beneficial, which is really important considering this time of year, a lot of people are making resolutions, and the single biggest one that people make over and over and over, the same one every year and fail, is to lose weight.
We're going to explore these two different types of fat cells and three interesting approaches to getting more of the good and less of the bad in today's good life update.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
Ah, fat.
It is that thing that we love to hate.
Hate to love.
We love the taste of fatty stuff in our foods, but we don't love the way that fat within our body makes us feel.
We don't love the inflammation that very often is associated with a very high level of fat within our body, within our cells, and all sorts of other risk and diseases and cosmetic things that go along with it.
But here's the thing about fat.
All fat, it turns out, is not created equal.
I've been kind of fascinated by this for many years now when I first started following some of the research on fat in their body.
And it turns out that there's a type of fat that exists in our body when we are bambinos, when we're first born, that is incredibly beneficial.
And for almost everybody, it tends to pretty much go away, except for trace amounts when we get older, which is a bit of a shame, because there's tremendous benefit in having this type of fat in our body.
So when we're born, we have a lot of these things called brown fat cells in our body, which is pretty distinct from the white fat cells that fill our body as we get older.
Then what's the big difference here?
And why would we care?