The New Fat
Posted at 5:30 AM on April 9, 2009
by Dale Connelly
(29 Comments)
Updated link! Here's the audio to the Susan Werner / Cheryl Wheeler Concert we recorded last month in Minneapolis!
Three scientific studies being published today in the New England Journal of Medicine deal with a "good" kind fat called Brown Fat, which is different from the "bad", or Yellow Fat that so many of us so obviously carry around with us everywhere we go.
Brown Fat, when activated, burns calories. The new studies suggest that these little furnaces turn on when we are cold. Subjects in one of the studies showed brown fat activity after they had been kept in a room at 61 degrees for two hours. The idea is to keep you on the verge of shivering so these biological devices can kick in, igniting to keep you warm using a built-in survival strategy from a prehistoric time when physical discomfort was the rule.
Next, scientists will try to find a way to use drugs to make brown fat work for us all the time without the discomfort ... but until they do, the door is open for northern entrepreneurs to "re-brand" our Minnesota weather.
Come to Frosty Bottoms Resort and Spa!Frosty Bottoms is the world's first Brown Fat - Igniting Retreat!
Get your natural systems started on the important and useful job of burning calories while you sit and do nothing in the luxurious splendor of a northern lakes winter!
Frosty Bottoms offers individual, unheated fat burning cabanas to give you the time and space necessary to re-focus your body's energies on creating a slimmer, more youthful and energetic YOU!At Frosty Bottoms, the whole environment is co-operating to get your Brown Fat cells working at peak efficiency.
Your job?
Be in the space.
Sit on a bucket or a plastic cooler and Let Nature Do Its Work.For ages the stalwart residents of these far northern lakes have let their surroundings spark the beneficial weight-draining Brown Fat reaction by embracing and enjoying their unique climate.
So effective is Brown Fat in burning off the pounds, these hardy locals instinctively turn to beer and cheesy nachos to keep themselves from wasting away to nothing!Your Frosty Bottoms Brown Fat Retreat Experience will begin the moment you step outside and feel the prevailing northwest wind as it pushes frosty air under your jacket, caressing you and tugging at your natural Brown Fat reserves, urging them to get busy turning your bad fat into heat that might keep you alive!
You can even watch television while your body begins to re-shape itself, forming a slimmer, more alive and alert and aware person who will never look at a frozen lake in the same way again!
You might even catch a fish!
How else can we take advantage of the coming Brown Fat craze?
Comments (29)
brilliant, Dale! thanks for the good laugh so early in the morning.
still on dial up, so no RH again today. still on barn watch. it's only 27 degrees (albeit 53 degrees warmer than when Alba arrived last year). hope the kiddos have lots of brown fat when they get here! but for now, i hope they stay in Momma until sunny saturday afternoon.
Thanks, Barb.
Maybe part of the program at Frosty Bottoms can include some invigorating goat-wrangling!
What a good laugh so early in the workday! Thanks.
We will now be able to advertise ourselves as the land of 10,000 spas. :-)
Greetings, all.
Morning Heartlanders!
Brown fat discussion for some reason makes me think about dark matter that is all the rage now in astrophysics. Can't see it, but somehow we "know" it's there. Hmmmm..
Well, I think we should add to our spa with some of the other things that we have in abundance here. Maybe group sessions of "Minnesota Nice"? And, of course, Barb and our other livestock breeders can probably contribute products that we could use for natural "baths" and "wraps"?
Have a great day everybody!
Dale -- the bullfrog song made me think of Hot Frogs...any room for this today?
Good morning RH,
As usual, Dale, your entry has me pondering. It must be disturbing for liposuction patients to consider the possibility that some of their good brown fat was removed along with the bad yellow. Will the result be new malpractice suits? Also, I'm disturbed because I love the color brown. I don't care if it is good fat - sounds disgusting! What shade of brown? Is it more or less appealing than the yellow? Do the colors compliment one another? Sorry for all the questions, but I think you kind of know how my mind works.
Hey Lora, see... the cold bedroom at Mom's isn't all bad!
Barb, I grieve for your dial-up malfunction, but am sure anticipating the arrival of the baby/s!
Greetings Heartlanders! This is extremely interesting and explains a lot of things. I've always been warm-bodied, so my body has not been able to use my excess brown fat effectively. Maybe that also explains why I still can't lose the excess weight even doing an hour of intense karate 5 times a week.
This will be such a boon to the Minnesota economy! The slim, beautiful people will all be here, not California. We'll become a film-making mecca and being beached whale white will become fashionable again. This is awesome.
Barb - looking forward to hearing the news of your new kid(s).
Does it follow that brown foods make brown fat and yellow foods create yellow fat? In which case chocolate should be good calories for burning fat (chocolate always qualifies as good calories, I think), and corn chips would be bad...hmm...
Anna-B-I love the way your mind works!
Thanks for the Joan Armatrading, Dale!
Cool homes...well, maybe my friends will stop complaining about the temperature I keep my house at (55-58)...but, it's the skinny ones who complain...they need the heat. I think you are right, Joanne, being warm-blooded is a disadvantage if you want to lose weight according to this research...it will have to be 50 degrees to affect me, I guess.
And let me say this about becoming a mecca for the California beautiful people...I've seen what their migration has done to Colorado and Montana...let them stay in California.
But, yes, a fashionable beached whale white would be good...the skin doctors would love that -- and it would take only brief moments in the sun to get our dosages of Vitamin D. Sounds healthy all around.
and we could make money for RH by selling chances on when the tourists would sink thru the ice in the spring!
Sherrilee, we have a mineral lick here at the farm that might appeal... of course they would have to compete with the goats (which would fit with the goat-wrangling, Dale) and also accept the fact that sometimes there might be a few pellets of poop in the mineral cup (i can't even imagine how that happens - it would take pretty good aim :-)
and maybe we could help the Frosty Bottoms patrons build more brown fat by serving them tater tot hotdish?
Donna, (and all kid-anticipators) i'm hoping to have a happy message for TB community by monday morning.
Something only Heartlanders can understand. I was just dancing around in the living room with the dogs, singing (loudly) along to "Hot Frogs on the Loose". My daughter came halfway down the stairs, saw me, made the most incredible "omigawd" face, turned around and went back up the stairs! At least hopefully I at least dumped some of those yellow fat cells. Keep up the good word Dale & Mike!
Ooooh! And if my brown and yellow food theory holds, then one of my other favorites - yummy Norwegian gjetost (rich, brown goat cheese) - would also be a fat burner.
Barb - do you get goat's milk that could be made into cheese? We could probably develop a whole host of goat-related amenities for the Frosty Bottoms Spa.
All in all, a great sales concept.
But......no self respecting (?) modern day huckster would let this pitch get out the door without seizing the obvious opportunity to take advantage of some tenuous reference to "ancient Native American wisdom" accompanied by soft flute music in the background. This could do wonders to pull in the dollars of folks who have a general aversion to concepts like "scientist" and "New England Journal of Medicine".
And don't forget to add the screech of whatever raptor it is that always seems to be on the sound track at the end of stuff like that.
Move fast on this and you might never have to hold another fund raising drive again!!
Sherilee -- yes, I've had that kind of thing happen to me as well. My teenage boys just kind of shake their heads as I gyrate to different songs on RH in the morning.
Yesterday when I was dancing to Harry Belafonte's "Jump in the Line" (Shake, Shake Senora -- whatever the title is) and it's a good thing there's not a stripper pole in my house (I was alone at the time). I could probably jerry-rig one, though ...
Good Morning!
I'll look forward to Genway's offering based on this new brown fat discovery; brown fat diet donuts, brown fat diet lard! Perhaps I'm not drinking enough beer, that has to have brown fat doesn't it?
The spa would need to have a picture of the average ice fisherman displayed to show the effects of constant cold on the human body.
Anna...gjetost! YES! Need lots of milk...it has to be cooked down to the caramilized, thickened stage...takes me all day for just a half gallon of milk to get to the right color and stage...rather like making maple syrup, I should think...speaking of which...maple syrup is also brown! The sap is running...!
I have some fun photos of Norwegian women making gjetost...I'll send them to Dale.
I like this thread of thinking of brown foods to make brown fat....excellent beginning.
Only passing through this morning... but just wanted to say thanks for playing Pulling On A Line!
No wonder I am skinny. I am always shivering from the cold. The furnace is set on 65 which is way too cold for me. I like the idea of brown fat in beer. Fits with my diet (ha, ha).
Thanks for the math songs. Genius is a far reach for me, but I keep struggling on. No other radio station I know takes a request for a song and plays several related songs. Keep up the good work!
Maybe it's just the marketing guy in me but I think 'Brown Fat' just doesn't have the ring or zing to get people excited. Maybe we could call it something like, "Bronzerol" (bronze-colored glycerol), or "Buffium."
Can't you just see someone like Billy Mays or that Sham-Wow guy telling you about "The umber uber-fuel of the future! It's more than just 'green,' it's 'soylant green' because it's made from you! Yes, through the miracle of nature, it's the best new fuel of the past...today! Activate your -real- 'fuel cells' now!" Etc, etc, etc....
Guy in the Hat -- most excellent! I love Bronzerol and the Soylent Green idea. What a riot!
"Yes, it's the copper-colored cholesterol that kills calories by keeping you cozy!"
(Never underestimate the power of alliteration.)
How about "What can BROWN do for you?" Taken?
OK, maybe "Brown is the new lean"? Cliche?
How about a small brown ribbon turned into a loop and worn on one's lapel? Over used?
Hmmm. "Brown, the other white fat." Somehow that sounds familiar.
I'll keep working on it.
I want a Frosty Bottoms Spa t-shirt!
Hey! That's not brown fat! It's CHOCOLATE! I knew all those M&M's would pay off someday.
hee hee, frosty bottoms, hee hee---yep, i'll need a t-shirt too----or perhaps it would be better to have the spa name spelled out on the seat of some fleece pants????
One Frosty Bottoms t-shirt logo designed, done, and delivered to Dale. Took about ten minutes. Dale will post it tomorrow. (Any marketing/advertising/design companies want to hire me?)
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