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Phat Fat

August 20, 2008 on 4:23 pm | In Main Category | No Comments

We love fat. Fat tastes goooood. We just don’t like looking fat. Does this hat make me look fat? And we don’t like being fat or we worry what all that fat might be doing to our hearts. Once again, it’s nerds scientists to the rescue:

White fat is the traditional bane of struggling dieters and would-be beach bunnies. Brown fat is quite different. It’s full of mitochondria — the body’s energy-producing cellular machines — and burns calories to produce heat.

Abundant in babies, whom it helps keep warm, brown fat is found only in traces in adults. But with a flick of two genetic switches, scientists have transformed cells destined to become muscle into brown fat.

You can read the whole story, here.