The Four Types of White Fat

The Four Types of White Fat
Aside from storing calories, white fat also produces hormones like adipokinectin, which makes muscles and liver more sensitive to the effects of insulin. It also tells you when to put down the fork by suppressing your appetite. The trouble is, when you acquire too much white fat, it says to hell with it and pretty much stops making adipokinectin.

To add insult to injury, fat cells also produce estrogen in both men and women, and once body fat levels climb, so do estrogen levels. It’s a holy mess.

There are several subcategories of white fat, though. Some are useful and some just hurt our eyes.

1. Subcutaneous
This is the type of fat that most bodybuilders and guys whose sole ambition in life is to walk around shirtless at music festivals fight against. It’s also what the institutional trainer pinches when they measure your body fat. It doesn’t affect your health negatively and it might even be advantageous, depending on where it’s located.

2. Thigh and Butt Fat
This type of subcutaneous fat is more likely to plague women. Some “junk in the trunk” is generally considered sexually appealing, but it’s when large amounts start to accumulate that women acquire that dreaded pear shape.

While the pear shape is generally considered unattractive, there’s some emerging evidence that pear-shaped women are protected against metabolic diseases, at least compared to big-bellied people. But don’t get the idea that the positive health benefits of a giant butt like Kim Kardashian’s will enable her to become semi-immortal and cast a shadow over all our graves for eons.

For one thing, the effects are relatively modest, and besides, once women hit menopause, they tend to lose this protection as they shift to storing fat in their abdomen instead of their butt and thighs.

3. Visceral Fat
This is the fat that burrows and wraps itself around your abdominal organs. If you’ve got a big waist or big belly, you most certainly have some visceral fat. While it’s important to the identity of Santa Claus impersonators and cross-country truckers everywhere, lots of visceral fat drives up the risk of heart disease and stroke. Visceral fat also seems to play a bigger role than other fats in jacking up insulin resistance and, ipso facto, diabetes.

4. Belly Fat
This type of fat is actually a hybrid – it’s both visceral and subcutaneous. Where it shifts from being one type to another is almost impossible to tell without a CT scan, but that’s a costly, impractical, and probably useless differentiation.

Suffice it to say, too much belly fat – more than a 40-inch waistline for men and a 35-inch waistline for women – puts you at increased risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. (And those numbers might even be lower. See this.)

Interestingly, belly fat is also the origin of most leptin, another hormone that controls metabolism and appetite. However, as is the case with adipokinectin, the leptin system goes out the window when too much fat accumulates.

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Burn 300 More Calories Per Day
Brown fat contains lots of mitochondria that feed on fat droplets. It also lures in sugar molecules from the bloodstream, which suggests it plays a role in fighting type II diabetes.

If you could increase your number of brown fat cells, rev up the activity of brown fat, or make white fat act like brown fat, you could possibly burn up to 300 extra calories a day. Any way you look at it, that kind of calorie deficit would translate to dropping a couple of pounds of fat every month without doing a damn thing.

Luckily, you can transform white fat to brown fat, or at least turn it “beige” – make white fat act more like brown fat. There are a few ways to do this, but let’s first look at one that’s a little impractical but interesting nonetheless.

1. The Ice Box Method
Merely exposing yourself to cold can make brown fat more active. In one 2012 study, researchers had men sit in cold suits that circulated water cooled to a temperature of 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit for three hours. The volunteers burned up an extra 250 calories compared to what they would have burned up just sitting there in normal room temperature.

Bear in mind, the temp of the water wasn’t low enough to induce shivering (which burns up calories), but just low enough to cause the mitochondria of fat cells to draw sugar molecules from white fat cells and bolster their internal furnaces.

Along the same lines, you can make white fat cells turn “beige” by using this same cold temp protocol, albeit without the Aquaman suits. Japanese researchers had 12 men with lower-than-average amounts of brown fat sit in rooms that had been cooled to 63 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours a day for six weeks. At the conclusion of the experiment, their bodies had “browned” some of their white fat and were burning an extra 289 calories a day.

As mentioned, these methods are a bit impractical. If, however, you weren’t put off by the impracticality, you could theoretically make yourself a bit colder this winter by keeping the thermostat as low as you could comfortably tolerate, and wearing clothing that wasn’t entirely suitable for the cold weather.

While there haven’t been any experiments to validate these exact approaches, it’s plausible that the accumulated time spent freezing your ass off could create more beige fat and burn a lot more calories. Luckily, there are other, non-human-popsicle ways to increase brown fat or beige fat.

2. Exercise
Simply working out causes muscle cells to release a hormone called “irisin” that causes white fat to act more like brown fat, along with jacking up the fat-burning effect of existing brown fat.

3. Olive Oil
There’s also a component of plain old extra-virgin olive oil that causes white fat cells to act more like brown fat cells. It’s called “oleuropein.” As proof, rats were fed a diet that included 1, 2, or 4 mg/kg of the phenolic compound. After 28 days, they’d lost body weight, perirenal adipose tissue (fat near the kidneys), and epididymal fat (the fat near their balls).

What apparently happened is that the olive oil constituent increased the levels of UCP1, an “uncoupling” protein that causes mitochondria to burn more energy and dissipate more heat. It’s the same mechanism used by the underground fat burner/insecticide DNP 61, but probably without the pesky, “Oh God, it killed my brother Lenny,” side effect.

Another study using rats had similar findings. They fed rats a diet containing 40% of energy from olive oil, sunflower oil, palm oil, or beef tallow. The olive oil rats showed the greatest activation of brown fat in their intrascapular brown fat and gastrocnemius muscles.

4. Melatonin
Melatonin is what globe-hopping flight attendants pop so they don’t fall into a sleep-coma while explaining the intricacies of seatbelts. It turns out it also stimulates the appearance of beige fat.

Simply making your bedroom darker (as opposed to being exposed to the electronic glow of smartphones, e-readers, or the TV) and eating melatonin-rich foods like Goji berries, almonds, cherries, and sunflower seeds can apparently increase levels of melatonin and, subsequently, beige fat.

5. The Blue in Blueberries
Cyanadin 3-glucoside (C3G) 729 is a nutrient found in blueberries, blackberries, black beans, and a few other fruits and vegetables. It’s well known for its anti-obesity effects, but most of those effects have largely been chalked up to C3G’s effects on selective insulin sensitivity, insulin signaling, and glucose and nutrient management in general. (These same traits also help give the compound its famed muscle-building effects 36.)

However, Japanese researchers have just discovered that C3G also turns white fat cells brown, meaning that ordinary fat-storing white cells are being converted into energy-burning brown cells.

Their paper, published recently in the Journal of Biochemistry, described how C3G “induced phenotypic changes to white adipocytes (fat cells).” These changes included increased mitochondrial content, which is the hallmark trait of brown fat cells. The C3G also promoted “pre-adipocyte differentiation,” which means it coaxed cute little baby fat cells into going brown.