Could this be a solution to help tackle the obesity problem in Ireland?
It’s no secret that there is a serious obesity problem in Ireland.
A study in 2016 found that Irish men already have the highest Body Mass Index (BMI) in Europe, with women in third place.
As well as that, a distributor of school uniforms throughout Ireland revealed that requests have been made for school trousers with waist sizes of up to 54 inches for September 2017 and children as old as 12 are unable to run, jump, catch, or hit any type of sports ball due to inactivity.
Obesity is a serious problem in Ireland but what if one simple conversion method could potentially abolish the bad fat in human bodies to good fat and thus prevent obesity?
A study published in Cell Reports by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, may have found a way to conduct such a conversion.
There are two types of fat tissues in the body, the good kind which helps you burn calories (brown) and the bad kind which stores fat (white).
Tested on mice, the researchers found that by blocking the process of a specific protein found in white fat cells, ‘beige fat’ was created which is neither good nor bad.
However, this blocking process eventually caused the beige fat cells to heat up and in turn, begin to act like brown fat tissues and burn calories.
Beige fat was first discovered in humans in 2015 by Georgia State University and is a possible pathway to combating obesity.
However, unlike mice, naturally occurring beige fat cells are limited in humans, and the author of the study, Irfan J. Lodhi, PhD, believes further research is needed in order to reach “a goal to find a way to treat or prevent obesity”.
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