Scientists turn into a bad fat calorie burning 'good' fat

Researchers have found a way to make bad fat for good fat burning calories, and said that the findings may lead to new and better treatments for obesity.

White or "bad" fats are usually gathered around the waist and your body and save the extra calories you consume.

But brown fat 'good' is found in abundance in infants, serves as a resource to burn calories and generate heat. By the time we are adults, most brown fat disappears and is replaced by white fat.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore initially tried to reduce body fat and body weight in mice by pressing the production of a protein called appetite-stimulating neuropeptide Y (NPY) in the brain that helps control hunger and thirst.

The results showed that mice treated in this way less weight gain after five weeks, compared with untreated mice are obese, showing that the pressed NPY causes fewer calories consumed.

But when the researchers studied mice with NPY suppressed, they found that some of their white fat has been replaced by brown fat.

The researchers speculate that the white adipose tissue may contain a few brown fat cells are activated when NPY is pressed.

In the future it is possible to transplant or inject brown fat cells under the skin to burn white fat and stimulate weight loss, the researchers said.

Dr. Sheng Bi at the university School of Medicine, who led the research, said: "If we can get the human body to defeat the" bad fats "to" good fats "that burns calories rather than storing them, we can add new tools to address the serious obesity epidemic .