Over the years, researchers have proven time after time that beige fat possesses both the qualities of white and brown fat. This “hybrid fat” can not only hoard energy, like white fat, but also burn energy, similar to brown fat.
In 2015, researchers discovered another interesting feature of beige fat: it has the ability to switch between storing and burning energy. Most recently, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco found a way of keeping beige cells in the energy-burning state.
Why does this matter? By preventing beige fat cells from digesting their own mitochondria, researchers actually protected mice against obesity and symptoms of prediabetes. A graduate student who worked on the study, Svetlana Altshuler-Keylin, explains. “We knew that the color of brown and beige fat comes from the amount of pigmented mitochondria they contain, so we wondered whether something was going on with the mitochondria when beige fat turns white.”

When we hear the term Body Mass Index (BMI) it’s often in relation to conditions such as Diabetes or high blood pressure. It’s not very often we hear BMI having anything to do with the brain – that is about to change. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Yale University have found a new link between high BMI and brain structure.
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Recently published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, the team of researchers showed that the brains of overweight people age at a much faster rate than those of their lean counterparts. In fact, researchers were able to show that the brains of obese or overweight individuals appear to age an extra ten years compared to lean people. Through brain scanning technology, the scientists were able to draw conclusions from the decrease in volume of white matter in the overweight or obese groups.