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CRISPR Gene Editing Create Fat Burning Brown Fat in Mice

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Researchers removed regular fat and used CRISPR gene editing to convert into higher calorie burning brown fat and then implanted the altered fat back into the body. The work was performed on mice. If this can be developed as a treatment for humans then 400 million people with diabetes would have better metabolism and this could be used to help people lose weight and control their weight.

Brown fat makes up 5% of the weight of baby and we lose brown fat as we age. A ten pound baby would have about 8 ounces of brown fat. Brown fat is good fat. Humans with higher levels of brown fat may have lower bodyweights. Three ounces of brown fat can burn several hundred calories a day.

Exposing your body to cool and even cold temperatures may help recruit more brown fat cells. Some research has suggested that just two hours of exposure each day to temperatures around 66˚F (19˚C) may be enough to turn recruitable fat to brown.

Short-term cold exposure may help people with brown fat burn 15 percent more calories than those without, according to a small study published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

SOURCES – Biorxiv, Healthline, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

21 thoughts on “CRISPR Gene Editing Create Fat Burning Brown Fat in Mice”

  1. This would come out in the safety testing, but I doubt discount the body's ability to cull these fat cells.

  2. Holding some huge fraction of our society at gunpoint all day is a cure worse than the disease.

    Actually, there are several "cures", but they are ALL worse than the disease from a social medicine viewpoint.
    It's not that we can't cure obesity. It's that we can't cure it in a way that is acceptable in terms of freedom, cost and side effects.

  6. If you follow the original article and poke around for similar papers, it seems the several hundred calories per day is a peak value that only occurs under particular hormonal/blood chemistry situations. It's not sitting there churning through more energy than your muscular system 24/7

  7. The other side of the evolutionary trap was that, in the wild, if you DO somehow manage to get a bit chubby, you are now
    1.. Using more energy in every activity
    2.. Find it more difficult to hunt and gather food, so you're probably eating less.
    Which combine to lean you up.

  9. There is a piece of equipment that can do it. It is call a cooling vest. Just a regular vest with pockets for ice packs. Ice packs are the packs you put in the freezer to freeze that you can use to cool things down. You have to put a little insulation between the packs and your skin to not burn your skin. You have to also be careful if you are diabetic since your sugar level can plunge. The ice packs should go where people normally have some brown fat deposits.

  10. 66F is actually quite comfortable. Put on a pair of socks and a pair of gloves and you can be quite comfortable at 66F and lower. For some reason, people feel uncomfortable when their toes and fingers get cold.

  11. Be careful, you could end up with "Thinner".

    A pill would be better. I wish there was a pill I could take every day that would cause by brown fat cells to burn more.

  12. "Some research has suggested that just two hours of exposure each day to
    temperatures around 66˚F (19˚C) may be enough to turn recruitable fat to
    brown."

    I must not have much "recruitable" fat, then.

  14. Animals in the wild are always on the slippery slope towards starvation. If they get too weak due to hunger, they won't be able to look or hunt for food and die.

    It's kind of an evolutionary trap: we are hardwired to appreciate the things that are making us fat, because in nature they are scarce and valuable.

    Fat, sugars, dense carbs. Or just meat, which usually requires the death of an uncooperative prey.

    Now that we live in a post-scarcity world concerning those things, we literally follow our hard-wired tastes to the grave.

    But Jennifer has a point: nowadays we need some discipline to counteract the instinctive desire to binge on those things. But as all choices, not everyone is willing or able to make them.

  15. 3 ounces can burn several hundred calories?

    So you get three pounds of the stuff and you either keep an eye out for all-you-can-eat buffets or you starve to death?

    Actually, given that weight lost typically leaves the body as carbon dioxide (that may not be the way you would have thought it did), there is probably a limit on how many calories even brown fat can burn . . . and it's probably a pretty bad thing to burn more than you can exhale.

  18. I wonder if someone could create a black market electroporosis device that overweight people can stick in their buttock to edit some of the fat cells there into brown fat cells?

    The market for banned diet pills suggests that there might be a market for this.

  19. I think it's been fairly conclusively proven, by decades of experimental evidence, that: No, a lot of people can't eat less.

  20. 19˚C for 2 hours?

    OK, I thought the theory that the "obesity epidemic" was caused by the introduction of climate control, central heating, and other temperature control technologies was a bit of a stretch.
    But a mere 19˚C for 2 hours is such a minor degree of discomfort that I'm sure most people encountered that regularly, at least until men gave woman control over the thermostats.

    That's assuming you aren't doing any physical activity. If you are doing something, 19˚C is about the correct comfortable temperature.

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