One of the holy grails of medicine (besides an anti-wrinkle cream) is a way to quickly dispose of jelly rolls, cellulite thighs and love handles. Sure, you could get liposuction — but ouch! Traditional liposuction involves poking around with a long hollow needle, known as a cannula, to simultaneously soften and suck out fat beneath the skin. It is generally performed for heavier patients with large volumes of fat while they are under general anesthesia. The procedures I’ve seen look brutal, and the bruising is a testament to that fact. On the other hand, tumescent liposuction, the gold standard for body sculpting, is used for much smaller areas under local anesthesia. It still employs a cannula, but the average recovery time is much shorter. I should also mention (as a measure to prevent my plastic surgeon brother from throwing Botox bottles at me for bashing on lipo) a newer type of liposuction that provides a less painful alternative. A laser point replaces the cannula, and when it is placed at an incision site under the skin, the fat melts like butter and is sucked out. The only downside is cost, which could add hundreds of dollars to an already steep price tag of $3,000 to $10,000. William P. Coleman III, writing as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery, stated he does not believe there is any scientific evidence that the laser can improve outcomes or recovery speed more than tumescent liposuction.
How about a low-carb diet? Not too healthy. Besides, it gives you hell-fire breath. The generally held view is that excess calories are converted into fat by the liver. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison isolated a gene — SCD-1 — which encodes an enzyme that synthesizes fatty acids. When normal mice were fed highly processed carbs, they naturally converted and stored the fat. But when mice without the SCD-1 gene were fed carbs, all the calories were burnt off and the mice remained thin. The research sounds promising, and one could theoretically create a medication that could turn off the SCD-1 gene; however, this approach involved one important side effect — the aforementioned mice became hypoglycemic from their inability to make sugar.
What if it were possible to train your fat to burn calories instead of storing them? Two recent studies in Nature magazine have shed light on pathways that may eventually allow us to do exactly that. The fat they are talking about looks a little different from the unsightly type — or white fat — that accumulates on our thighs, bellies and buttocks. The “good” stuff is actually brown. While white fat stores energy for later use, the primary role of brown fat is to consume energy and generate heat. In fact, the brownish tinge of the fat comes from boatloads of mitochondria (which are like tiny coal power plants) found inside the cells. In humans, brown fat can be found in newborns behind the neck and on part of the upper back between the shoulder blades. It tends to make up about 5 percent of their body mass, but shortly after birth much of it disappears after conversion to white fat. The heat and temperature stability produced by brown fat is critical to a newborn’s survival before the baby develops the capability to produce heat in other ways.
The studies published in Nature highlight two proteins that can induce immature fat cells or muscle cells to form brown fat. Thus, a drug that could increase the number of these proteins in targeted fatty areas could potentially transform the adipose tissues into calorie-burning centers. A different therapy suggested by one of the co-authors, Bruce Spiegelman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, would entail the injection of brown fat directly into problem spots of the abdomen. This would allow free fatty acids produced by white fat to be quickly burned off by adjacent brown fat. The next step for the researchers will be to test these ideas in obese rats — specifically for calorie-burning potential and any possible adverse effects.
I won’t be preachy because I’m sure that you already know that a healthy diet and exercise are the best ways to become a lean, mean, fat-fighting machine. It would be pretty sweet, though, if you could stay thin after snacking on triple-fudge chocolate cakes and fried Twinkies without having to leave your couch.
Ashok Tholpady is a University Medical student. He can be reached at a.tholpady@cavalierdaily.com.
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