Health and Fitness
Reduce White Fat and Increase Brown One Naturally
Here’s how to activate brown fat in practical steps based on the review of the literature and personal experience
Brown versus White Fat Tissues for Health
Believe it or not, the color of our fat matters for our metabolism, fitness, vitality, healthy weight management, and overall health. There are two colors, as documented in the body of knowledge: brown and white adipocytes. We know that brown fat is healthier than white one for various reasons.
When I recently posted this article about eliminating visceral fat, which gained significant interest from readers, some subscribers wanted to know more about brown fat tissues and practical ways to increase them.
As I mentioned before, brown fat tissues have more mitochondria. I provided 12 tips to increase mitochondria. Some of the tips in that article apply to activating brown fat.
As documented in this scientific paper on Metabolism:
“It is well understood that adipose tissues vary in their function and are dependent on both the type and anatomical location of the depot. Far from being merely energy storage depots, adipose tissues are potentially the largest endocrine organ in the body and, by the secretion of numerous factors, can regulate a range of physiological functions, including metabolic homeostasis, appetite, angiogenesis, immunity, and cardiovascular system.”
The critical point in the paper in my post’s context is that “brown adipose tissue is located primarily in the supraclavicular region but also in smaller amounts around the kidneys, vasculature, and heart. Brown adipose tissue is responsible for adaptive thermogenesis, which preserves homeostasis in response to a thermal stimulus such as temperature and energy balance.”
There is a significant focus on activating brown fat in healthcare communities. For example, this review paper in Frontier’s Physiology Journal mentions:
“Activation of brown adipose tissue represents today a promising strategy to enhance energy expenditure through heat production. More recently, “browning” of white adipose tissue has gained increasing attention in the research area as an alternative method in stimulating energy dissipation.”
I have been researching the topic for over a decade. Even though I gained insights from the literature, most of my knowledge was through my personal experimentation and observation of people with relatively more brown fat than others.
So, without going into too many scientific details, I introduce three practical tips to increase brown fat with simple lifestyle habits by citing a few prominent papers.
1 — Thermogenesis, a.k.a. Cold Exposure
From my experience and reviews, cold exposure makes the most significant difference in gaining more brown fat. By reviewing endocrinology literature, I learned that when the body exposes to cold, it produces norepinephrine. The brown fat tissues have norepinephrine receptors that signal mitochondria to create energy. As mentioned before, fat loss is a hormonal issue.
Neuroendocrine Control of Energy Stores in Williams Textbook of Endocrinology defines thermogenesis as “the dissipation of energy through the production of heat and occurs in specialized tissues including brown adipose tissue and skeletal muscle.”
I used cold therapy in two ways. For me, the most significant contributor to the increase in my brown fat was daily cold showers. Years ago, when I had substantial visceral fat, as advised by my functional medicine doctor, I applied an ice bag to my abdominal area for 20 minutes daily.
After a few weeks, I did not feel the cold as cold exposure seemed to create more brown fat. When I tried this protocol for six months, my waistline shrank by five inches, and my fat body percentage decreased by around 3%, according to DEXA Scan.
Unfortunately, as the DEXA scan could not identify the difference between white and brown fat tissues, I had to try micromagnetic resonance imaging, which Medicare did not cover at the time as it was not a referral by a medical specialist.
As confirmed in this review paper, “magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic resonance spectroscopy methods can non-invasively assess brown adipose tissue structure and function.” However, some innovative scientists are re-configuring DEXA scan data to detect brown fat percentages.
I don’t use ice bags anymore, as my visceral fat disappeared over a decade ago. Reducing visceral fat gave me a defined belly after 50 years of age and increased my vitality.
However, I still have a few cold showers every day for various reasons, creating a thermogenic effect on my body fat composition in addition to increasing my energy and boosting my mood.
Superhuman Wim Hof, a globally known adventurist and multiple Guinness Book record holder in cold exposure, also contributed to the science communities by making his biological data available for therapeutic research.
Nowadays, millions of people follow Wim’s ice-cold exposure and unique breathing methods to improve their health. Positive testimonials are overwhelming in the media. He has been an inspiration to me to embrace cold for my physical and mental health.
2 — Resistance and High-Intensity Training
As pointed out in this review paper:
“Exercise, through various secreted factors and mechanisms, induces browning of white fat tissues. However, the physiological explanation for this process is unclear. From an evolutionary point of view, preserving energy stores is vital. It is plausible that our lean and active ancestors naturally possessed large quantities of brown adipocytes. Our subsequent transition to a modern, largely sedentary population has meant these adipocytes have undergone a whitening, and the browning that occurs in response to exercise is a transition back to their natural state.”
The paper highlights that:
“Exercise and physical activity play a key role in modulating many parameters of cardiometabolic health, eliciting several benefits on adipose tissues. A reduction in adipocyte size can be seen with exercise training. Furthermore, exercise training elicits improvements in adipose tissue inflammation, vascularity, and mitochondrial biogenesis, increasing the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the tissue and improving their oxidative capacity. More recently, it has emerged that factors produced during exercise by skeletal muscle, adipose tissue, and potentially the liver act to induce the ‘browning’ of white fat in an endocrine and paracrine manner.”
From my experience and observations, resistance training and high-intensity training significantly impact browning white fat tissues. When I observed athletes performing resistance and HIIT, I noticed that they have less fat in the belly, hips, and thighs. It is well known that lean people with a lower fat percentage have more brown fat than overweight people.
When I was doing excessive cardio, I was relatively lean but had bulging fat stores in my abdominal area. Interestingly, I was terribly shivering when I got exposed to cold.
However, my belly fat shrank after transitioning to resistance training coupled with HIIT. I don’t shiver anymore when taking cold showers, going out in cold weather, and walking barefoot on grass in winter. As documented in the literature, babies who expose to cold don’t shiver because they have lots of brown fat.
I documented my perspectives on the value of exercise.
3 — Customized Diet and Time-Restricted Eating
My experience with the effects of food and nutritional approaches to brown fat is limited. However, I gained some insights from the studies. For example, this review paper on Frontier’s Physiology “summarized the current knowledge of some dietary compounds that have been shown to promote brown adipose tissue activation and white adipose tissue browning with subsequent beneficial health effects.
The paper reviewed nutrients such as capsaicin, resveratrol, curcumin, green tea, menthol, and omega-3 fatty acids.
The study concluded that:
“Despite the promising data from animal models or cell lines, these findings need to be validated in humans by further large clinical trials with a relatively long-term period of follow-up and taking into consideration factors such as ethnicity, genetics, and lifestyles. Moreover, current knowledge deriving from cell culture and animal models suggests that polyphenols, mainly curcumin, and resveratrol, exert their thermogenic effect when supplemented at doses that are quite elevated.”
This study, published in Nature, investigated amino acid changes, specifically branched-chain amino acids (BCAA), during the transition from hyperthyroidism to euthyroidism and the impact of active brown adipose tissue on the metabolic effects of BCAA. Interestingly, after they separated the participants into brown adipose tissue positive and negative groups, they found that the strongest positive associations only existed in negative participants.
Some nutrients are believed to have a positive impact on brown adipose tissues. However, there are no adequate conclusive studies. As depicted in my experience of time-restricted eating with more subcutaneous fat than visceral fat, I also found evidence in a scientific paper published in Nature titled Fasting induces a subcutaneous-to-visceral fat switch mediated by microRNA-149–3p and suppression of PRDM16. It points out that “fasting mobilizes more visceral fat than subcutaneous depot.”
Based on my experience and observations of lean people, I believe that a customized diet rich in fat-mobilizing nutrients coupled with time-restricted eating might increase brown fat and reduce white fat. I hope we can get more studies on nutritional contributions to brown fat increase.
Conclusions and Takeaways
Brown fat can be a solution for metabolic disorders. For example, as mentioned in a paper in Nature, “given its lipid and glucose-lowering effects, there is a strong interest in brown adipose tissue as a therapeutic target for improving metabolic syndrome.”
My understanding of the reasons from the paper is that “brown adipose tissue is a thermogenic organ. In addition to its function in regulating energy expenditure, activated brown adipose tissue serves as a sink for the metabolic substrates, glucose, and fatty acids.”
Measuring our fat profile can be ideal. Even though it is possible to test brown tissue structure and function via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), they are costly and might not be covered by health insurance. I see this expense as an investment for my health, so I try it once a year to understand my annual progress.
As the largest organ, adipose tissues are critical for our health, regulating biological and chemical functions such as metabolic homeostasis, metabolic pathways, lipogenesis, insulin, leptin, ghrelin, immunity, angiogenesis, and the overall cardiovascular system.
In addition, the body needs fat for various functions, including homeostasis, which is critical for survival. However, like anything else in life, too much fat can be toxic to the body. Too little fat, such as under 3%, could be a problem too.
As I explained in this story, having more brown fat tissues than white ones looks healthier. The good news is that these three lifestyle changes might improve insulin sensitivity, increase our mitochondria, and initiate autophagy, positively contributing to our health and longevity.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I believe these simple lifestyle habits might give you ideas to analyze your metabolic situation, research solution alternatives, and have a productive dialogue with qualified healthcare professionals.
Taking personal responsibility for our health and longevity is essential. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
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