Brown Fat vs White Fat

Brown fat vs white fat; which one reflects a healthy metabolic state? An which one is a sign of bad metabolism and future heart condition? People do know that there is an adipose tissue, but most of them do not know that there are two types: the brown and the white. The cells that make them up are in a different metabolic states and gives the human body two different shapes. One grows proportionately on our body, the other builds up around our waist, giving us a bulging belly.

The healthy fat

We can say that brown fat is a healthy kind of fat, for its adipose cells contain mitochondria, the cell organelles that produce ATP from either glucose or ketone bodies. So, this type of adipose cells are always providing us with heat as they are constantly burning fuel to produce ATP, the energy that we need. Thus, they are called thermogenic. So, these adipose cells do not bulge and swell up with triglycerides, for they do not store fuel but burn it constantly to manufacture ATP. Since, they provides us with heat, the immune system function also improves. Brown fat is related to our diet and lifestyle as it could be found in the body of the primitive hunters and shepherds community where they do not eat starches and sugar, but only animal fat and meat.

You will develop brown fat if you get in the metabolic state of ketosis. And that only happens if you do not eat carbs, and when you eat only animal fat, meat, eggs, butter, nuts, that is to say the hunter's diet; which is the ketogenic diet. Today we see brown fat in babies, who are surrounded by pads-like brown fat all over their bodies, for they consume an enormous amount of saturated fat when they eat their mother's milk, which contains up to 50% fat. That is the main reason why babies do not shiver or shake when exposed to lower temperatures, for they are surrounded by brown fat, like the Inuit people's (Eskimos) body, at least until the 1980's when they were still pure hunters.

The unhealthy fat

Nowadays white fat is a symbol of sedentary life and junk food, such as starches, table sugar, fructose, in other words carbohydrates, which are massively provided to us by modern agriculture and the milling industry that produces refined flour. The adipose cells in this type of fat do not have mitochondria, so they do not produce ATP and heat. Their only function is to store triglycerides in great amount, getting stuffed and swollen with them.

White fat builds up mainly around our waists when glucose levels in our bloodstream go up beyond the normal limit. Since too much sugar in our blood is inflammatory, it has to be lowered. Thus, pancreas insulin make the cells in our body tissues convert the excess glucose into molecules of triglycerides, which are later absorbed by the adipose cells in the adipose tissue. Thus, white fat is related to coronary diseases, diabetes, and Alzheimer disease.

In the brown fat vs white fat comparison. It is clear that brown fat was the fat that covered the body of our ancestors. The hunters that lived during the last glacial period.

By Carlos B. Camacho (biological anthropologist)