Harvard Researchers Discover A New Fat-Burning Hormone Released When You Exercise

Brown fat vs white fat

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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What Irisin can do for your body

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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Irisin is also produced in the human body

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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Irisin isn’t a manufactured drug

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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