An extremely exciting paper was published the other day in the journal Nature.

All the attention seems to be centered around a newly identified hormone that mimics a workout & could increase “good” brown fat in the body allowing people to burn unwanted fat much faster.

Brown fat in the human body was thought, for a long time, to be limited at birth. But it has been discovered that brown fat can actually be increased by intense exercise over time.Research scientists at at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA have identified and isolated a hormone in the body that mimics the effects of exercise on muscle tissue.

The hormone (named Irisin after the Greek messenger goddess Iris), is a protein and chemical messenger that may be used to develop completely new treatments for obesity and diabetes. It could also be used to help overweight people burn fat much faster by causing white gooey fat to covert itself into brown, heat producing fat.

The senior researchers on the paper are Bruce Spiegelman PhD, a cell biologist at Dana-Farber and Pontus Bostroöm, MD, PhD who is a post-doctoral fellow in the lab. Bostroöm says “It’s exciting to find a natural substance connected to exercise that has such clear therapeutic potential”.

More on this in the next few days as we find out if and when this will translate into anything actually useful.

T.

{ 0 comments }