Exercise Turns Bad Fat Into Good Fat

At serious risk of oversimplification, there is what scientists call “bad fat” and there is “good fat’. The bad fat is the fat around your stomach. It is known to researchers as white fat, and it basically stores energy and make you look unhealthy. The good fat, recently discovered, is known to scientists as brown fat. It burns energy, including the energy in white fat, which is a good thing, and makes you healthy. Now comes research from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School suggesting that exercise produces a protein (that produces a hormone) that seeks out cells of bad white fat and turns them into good brown fat. In a less simplistic explanation, Gretchen Reynolds reports on the research, published in Nature, in the New York Times Well column. Reynolds tell us that the initial research, conducted with mice, is supported by follow-up experiments with  humans who did a weeks-long jogging program. The researchers found that the runners had much higher levels of the hormone that turns white fat to brown fat in their cells than they had before the exercise program began. Read more from Gretchen Reynolds.