Question: Why can brown fat be burnt?

Sonia Rodriguez answered on 23 Jun 2020: last edited 23 Jun 2020 9:12 pm

The main role of brown fat is to burn fat to produce heat and keep us warm. For that, brown fat cells have a lot of mitochondria (which are brown) and a special protein that is called UCP1. When the brown fat cells are activated, they can burn in the mitochondria all the lipids or fat they were storing using the UCP1 protein to convert the energy produced into heat.
In babies brown fat is very abundant, because they need to regulate their temperature better and in adults brown fat is located mainly in the deep neck area.
In contrast, the typical fat (that we call white fat) is mainly for fat storage and cannot burn fats using that mechanism.