What do you think about when you go for a brisk walk on a beautiful day? The sun and the breeze make it feel good to loosen up your stiff body. One thing is for sure, and that is the last thing on your mind is what’s going on with your body chemistry. When you work out, your body’s chemicals change in ways you wouldn’t have understood earlier. Over the past 20 years, scientists have found natural molecules affecting appetite, metabolism, and body weight in every person. Now, scientists at Harvard Medical School and other places are looking for the molecules that constitute a specific fat-burning hormone that affects your weight. This hormone shows you why exercise is exceptionally beneficial for your health.
A new study shows that when you work out, your body releases a hormone that helps you lose weight and keeps fat from forming. In 2012, a group of researchers at Harvard Medical School found the hormone. They called it irisin.
Dr. Anthony Komaroff, a professor at Harvard Medical School, says, “Our muscle cells need a source of energy when they exercise. Muscles get that energy by burning fat and sugar brought to them by the blood. That’s been known for nearly a century. However, it’s not the whole story.”
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A group of researchers led by Dr. Bruce Spiegelman, a professor at Harvard Medical School, put out a new study in the journal Nature in January 2012. The study was done on mice, but it might also be true for humans. The study showed that a hormone called irisin is produced when muscles are worked out.
Dr. Komaroff explains- “Irisin travels throughout the body in the blood, and alters fat cells. Body fat is stored inside fat cells. Most of these fat cells are called white fat cells, and their function is to store fat.”
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Why do your bodies keep fat? When you eat more calories than you burn through exercise, the extra calories must go somewhere. Part of them is stored as fat. But humans in the past didn’t eat as often as we do. Forty thousand years ago, our ancestors could only get a good meal a few times a week on the Serengeti. Between meals, they had to have something to keep them going. A big part of it was the fat they put on after eating.
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In 2009, researchers at Harvard Medical School and other places found that people have both white and brown fat cells. Dr. Komaroff explains, “Brown fat cells don’t store fat: they burn fat. If your goal is to lose weight, you want to increase the number of your brown fat cells and to decrease your white fat cells.”
In other words, it was found that when you exercise, irisin levels go up, and this hormone turns on genes that change white fat into brown fat. This is good because brown fat burns more calories than exercise alone. At least in mice, irisin helps increase brown fat cells while decreasing white fat cells and the new brown fat cells keep burning calories even after exercising.
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It has been known for a long time that moderate exercise done regularly keeps type 2 diabetes at bay. For example, a lifestyle program with regular moderate exercise decreases the risk of type 2 diabetes by nearly 60%, which was way more than any medicine that had been made up to that point. What causes that? Irisin could be a key piece of the answer. Not only does it help make brown fat cells, but it also helps prevent or treat insulin resistance, which is responsible for causing type 2 diabetes.
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Dr. Spiegelman did his research on mice, but he found that people also have irisin, aka the fat-burning hormone. Even though it hasn’t been proven yet, irisin likely has the same effects on people.
Dr. Komaroff. Says, “Studies like these are just plain interesting, in and of themselves. They help us to understand better how our body works. However, the discovery of irisin also could have some very practical and beneficial applications. Theoretically, irisin could become a treatment to help us maintain healthy body weight and reduce the risk of diabetes.”
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Many other medicines promise to help people keep their weight in check and reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes, and other diseases. But irisin is not a drug that doesn’t come from nature. Instead, it’s a part of how your bodies work because it is a fat-burning hormone produced in your body. That might make it work better and less likely to hurt you. So, the excitement about irisin and how quickly science is learning about the chemistry of exercise, appetite, metabolic rate, and body weight is well-founded.
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Your surroundings significantly influence how much you work out, eat, and therefore how much you weigh. Dr. Komaroff says, “We don’t have to wait for a magic potion. We already have a proven treatment that profoundly protects our health: exercise.”
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Professor Li-Jun Yang, from the Department of Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine, is currently leading the most recent research on irisin. The study’s objective was to learn more about what irisin does and how the hormone helps turn white fat cells, which store calories, into brown fat cells, which burn energy.
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Irisin works by increasing the activity of genes and a protein that are important for changing white fat cells to brown fat cells. Researchers also found that irisin contributes to burning fat by making brown fat cells use much more energy.
Professor Yang and his team carried out the research by getting fat cells from 28 people who had undergone breast reduction surgery. Scientists gave the fat samples irisin and found that the number of cells with the UCP1 protein, which is essential for burning fat, increased by almost five times. He says, “We used human fat tissue cultures to prove that irisin has a positive effect by turning white fat into brown fat and that it increases the body’s fat-burning ability.”
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After analyzing the fat tissue samples, it was found that irisin stops fat cells from forming by reducing the number of mature fat cells by 20–60% compared to the control group. These findings indicate that this fat-burning hormone makes the body store less fat by stopping the process that turns undifferentiated stem cells into fat cells. It also helps the stem cells turn into cells that make bones.
The beneficial effects of irisin could even be used to develop therapies in the future. But whether or not an irisin-based treatment would work is unclear and would certainly not happen any time soon. Professor Yang says: “Instead of waiting for a miracle drug, you can help yourself by changing your lifestyle. Exercise produces more irisin, which has many beneficial effects including fat reduction, stronger bones, and better cardiovascular health.”
The researchers say that they think this is the first study of its kind to look at how irisin affects human fat tissue and fat cells. It also supports earlier findings that irisin could be a good target for helping people with obesity and type 2 diabetes.
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