Heart Hormone Linked to Calorie-Burning Brown Fat

You may have heard about brown fat -- a unique type of fat that acts like a furnace in the body to burn calories instead of storing them as excess weight.

Adults don’t have much brown fat, but a new study suggests that hormones produced by the heart just might help them make more.

Researchers found that the hormones, known as cardiac natriuretic peptides, caused regular energy-storing white fat cells to turn into energy-burning brown fat in mice.

If studies show the same thing in humans, the heart hormone may hold the key to an effective weight loss treatment, says researcher Sheila Collins, PhD, of Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in Orlando, Fla.

The study appears online in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

“These hormones are involved in fluid regulation, but we showed in this study that they also play a role in breaking down fat,” she says.

Brown Fat and Heart Hormones

Collins and colleagues have long studied how the body’s adrenaline system regulates fat storage and weight loss.

In their latest work, they showed that the heart-derived hormones activate the same fat-burning process as the adrenaline pathway and that the two systems can work together to promote the browning of fat cells.

When they exposed mice to cold, the mice exhibited elevated amounts of natriuretic peptides in their circulatory systems, which turned on the fat-burning brown fat...