Fat can be directly converted into muscle, scientists have discovered, raising new hope for overweight people.

The promise of turning a beer gut into a six-pack has been raised from two studies into the link between fat and muscle.

But they say only the body’s ‘good’ fat which we are born with can be transformed, and not the ‘bad’ fat created by over-eating and not exercising enough.

In two related studies published today in the journal Nature, scientists identify the factors that regulate fat formation and, most important, control the type of fat.

Although we all wish we had a little less of it, fat is essential for managing our energy balance and helping to regulate body temperature.

But there are two distinct types of fat tissue: white ‘bad’ fat acts as an energy store whereas brown ‘good’ fat, which largely disappears by adulthood, also helps in burning calories to generate body heat, which is crucial to keep babies warm.

Now one team has shown how to promote the manufacture of “good” brown fat, so we can burn more calories, while a second team, also working nearby on the US east coast in Boston, has shown how brown fat and muscle are linked, suggesting ways to interconvert the two. Both offer a new strategy to fight flab.

In the first study, Dr Yu-Hua Tseng and her colleagues at the Joslin Diabetes Centre, Harvard Medical School, identified one factor - bone morphogenetic protein 7 (BMP7) - that promotes brown fat development, after using gene therapy to introduce the protein into mice.

“Obesity is occurring at epidemic rates,” comments Dr Yu-Hua Tseng. “We hope this study can be translated into applications to help treat or prevent obesity,” though she stresses that “diet and exercise are still the best approaches for weight reduction in the general population.”

he new work opens up the way for drugs to mimic the effects of BMP-7 and “may provide hope to these individuals in losing weight and preventing the metabolic disorders associated with obesity,” she said, referring to the well known link between type two diabetes and obesity.

In the second Nature study, Prof Bruce Spiegelman and colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, show that the two types of fat develop from distinct cell types in the early embryo. They found a factor, called PRDM16, that regulates the switch between muscle and fat.

Knocking out PRDM16 in brown fat cells can convert them into muscle cells and they say that finding drugs to do this “could be powerful” when it comes to fighting obesity.

The confirmation will spur ongoing research with Dr Patrick Seale in his laboratory, he said, to see if drugs that rev up PRDM16 in mice — and potentially, in people — could convert white fat into brown fat and thereby treat obesity.

Another strategy, he said, might be to transplant brown fat cells into an overweight person to turn on the calorie-burning process. “I think we now have very convincing evidence that PRDM16 can turn cells into brown fat cells, with the possibility of combating obesity,”

Intriguingly, the link between brown fat and muscle has been known for centuries.

In 1551, when the Swiss naturalist Konrad Gessner first described brown adipose tissue, he stated that on examination it struck him it was “neither fat, nor flesh [nec pinguitudo, nec caro] - but something in between”.

The new work shows that brown fat is more flesh-like than previously suspected.

These cells are brown because they are rich in energy burning structures called mitochondria. The new work makes sense of earlier research findings, such as the discovery that many proteins found in brown fat cells are more similar to those found in muscle than in white fat.

Health Survey for England data revealed that in 2006, 38 per cent of adults in England were overweight and 24 per cent were classified as obese.

Another report, Foresight: Tackling Obesities: Future Choices published last year, predicts that if no action is taken, by 2050, 60 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women and 25 per cent of children will be obese.

New discoveries surrounding a type of “good” fat that promotes the burning of calories could one day lead to better treatments for obesity, researchers say.

Unlike more recognizable white fat, which stores surplus energy, brown fat burns energy to generate heat.

Newborn babies have brown fat — presumably to help regulate their body temperature — but adults are believed to have little.

Researchers have studied brown fat for several decades in the hope that unlocking the mysteries of the unique fat could result in treatments to speed up metabolism and promote weight loss.

Two new studies to be published tomorrow in Nature may bring them closer to that goal.

“I really do believe that promoting brown fat growth is a plausible approach to weight control,” researcher Bruce Spiegelman, PhD, of Harvard University’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, tells WebMD. “To me it is attractive because of its simplicity. If more of our fat were brown fat, the mouse studies suggest that we would be leaner and better able to resist obesity.”

Brown Fat Derived From Muscle

In earlier research, Spiegelman and colleagues identified what he calls a “master switch” in mice, which promotes the production of brown fat.

In their latest animal studies, the researchers showed that the molecular switch, known as PRDM16, regulates the creation of brown fat from immature cells and that knocking out PRDM16 turned them into muscle cells.

“We showed that brown fat and white fat have completely different origins,” he says. “Brown fat is derived from muscle. That was a huge surprise.”

In the second study, researchers from Harvard’s Joslin Diabetes Center described a different trigger for brown fat.

Yu-Hua Tseng, PhD, and colleagues identified the protein BMP-7, which is known for promoting bone growth, as a growth factor for brown fat.

In mouse studies, the researchers found that mice genetically altered to have no BMP-7 protein had less brown fat as they developed than non-altered mice.

And developing mice treated with BMP-7 ended up with more brown fat than untreated mice and had greater energy expenditures.

Tseng tells WebMD that her lab is now studying the impact of long-term BMP-7 induction on body composition of mice.

“The hope is that this research will lead to better ways to treat obesity, especially for people who are overweight because of their genes,” Tseng says. “Right now, there are not many good options for these people.”

Brown Fat: Unanswered Questions

In an editorial accompanying the two studies, obesity researcher Barbara Cannon, PhD, of Stockholm University, noted that while the two studies answer some questions about the production of brown fat, they raise others about the role of BMP-7 and PRDM16 in obesity and weight control.

“Answers to these questions would take us a step closer to the ultimate goal of promoting the brown fat lineage as a potential way of counteracting obesity.”

Spiegelman tells WebMD that he believes obesity treatments that promote the production of brown fat could be a reality in as little as a decade.

“We know that we can stimulate the production of brown fat in mice,” he says. “It is not unreasonable to think that we can also do this in humans.”

A protein that induces bone growth also helps promote development of “good” brown fat that helps burn calories and plays a role in fighting obesity, says researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

They said their finding about the protein, called BMP-7, may help lead to new ways to prevent and treat obesity.

The two main types of fat cells in the body are white and brown, explained study author Yu-Hua Tseng, an assistant investigator in Joslin’s Section on Obesity and Hormone Action.

“White fat cells are the ‘conventional’ form of fat designed to store energy. By contrast, the main role of brown fat is to burn calories by generating heat. Brown fat cells largely disappear by adulthood in humans, but their precursors still remain the body,” Tseng said in a Joslin news release.

In laboratory studies of mouse cells, Tseng and colleagues found that BMP-7 drives the precursor cells that give rise to mature brown fat cells. They also found that injecting BMP-7-treated progenitor cells (similar to stem cells) into mice led to increased development of brown fat tissue, and that mice that developed brown fat gained less weight than those that didn’t develop brown fat.

The study was published in the Aug. 21 issue ofNature.

The Joslin team hopes this type of research into fat development will lead to new drugs or other treatments for obesity.

“Diet and exercise are still the best approaches for weight reduction in the general population. However, for people who are genetically predisposed to obesity, these approaches may have very little effect,” Tseng said.

“As we learn more about the controls of brown fat development, medical interventions to increase energy expenditure by brown fat inducing agents, such as BMP-7, may provide hope to these individuals in losing weight and preventing the metabolic disorders associated with obesity,” she said.

Mereka yg sukar turun berat bukan sahaja disebabkan kalori lebihan,..dlm kes begini walaupun kalori sudah dikurangkan dan Jus Mate diambil utk tingkatkan metabolisma dan pembakaran lemak,..lemak tidak mampu di bakar / dihancurkan kerana ia dihalang oleh faktor halagan seperti:

1. kerosakan sel akibat sudah mengamal pil langsing berkimia,
2. kesan ubatan steroid , pil kesuburan, pil perancang dan kesan negetif lain yg telah doc bincangkan .

Namun jika penguna sanggup hya ambil plain water + JDM 2X + sedikit buah + sedikit sayur=pasti badan anda mampu utk di didik dan menerima JDM utk membakar lemak.

kejayaan penguna yg alami kes begini sudah byk.

Dr Rozmey.