Yet Another Reason To Keep The Thermostat Down

Yet Another Reason To Keep The Thermostat Down

This April 8, 2009 New York Times article indicates that if you stay cold, it is possible that your "brown fat" cells will activate, burning calories:

For more than 30 years, scientists have been intrigued by brown fat, a cell that acts like a furnace, consuming calories and generating heat. Rodents, unable to shiver effectively to keep warm, use brown fat instead. So do human infants, who do not shiver very well. But it was generally believed that humans lose brown fat after infancy, no longer needing it once the shivering response kicks in.

That belief, three groups of researchers report, is wrong.

Their papers, appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicate that nearly every adult has little blobs of brown fat that can burn huge numbers of calories when activated by the cold, as when sitting in a chilly room that is between 61 and 66 degrees.

I generally keep the thermostat set to 65 anyway, because I love Mother Earth! (And because I'm a cheapskate.) But I've just knocked it down a couple of more degrees. And because of where brown fat tends to accumulate, I may start wearing T-shirts, to expose more of my neck. Or maybe just skip the shirts entirely, at least when I'm working at home.

By the way, the author of that article is Gina Kolata. If the name is familiar--I had some nice things to say about her book about the 1918 flu pandemic several years ago.