Fat Lot of Good

Don't get up, and keep right on eating that garbage, America. A team at the Harvard Medical School has discovered a protein which induces the metabolisms of mice to generate brown fat. Brown fat is a Good Fat which burns calories and generates body heat. Brown fat should not be confused with white fat, which is a Bad Fat. White fat stores energy, though not in a way that can be exploited to reduce electricity bills, and contributes to the present epidemic of obesity. The discovery of the Good Fat-producing protein means that eventually, "medical interventions to increase energy expenditure by brown fat inducing agents, such as BMP7, may provide hope to these individuals in losing weight and preventing the metabolic disorders associated with obesity", according to the team leader. The ultimate goal of this and other research, according to a commentary in Nature, is "promoting the brown fat lineage as a potential way of counteracting obesity". One day there may even be "specific drugs and techniques that could help the body make more brown fat cells or else genetically engineer white fat cells to turn brown"; dietary improvements and increased exercise being apparently beyond the cognitive capacities of twenty-first-century science.