When most people hear the word fat, they freak out.
And why not? An abundance of fat leads to some scary conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. But there is such a thing as good fat – and you want as much of it as you can get.
Brown Fat and White Fat
So there is good fat and bad fat – and you do need both, though you certainly want a lot more of one than the other.
The good fat is brown fat. It’s described as such as it has lots of tiny blood vessels running through it to give it that appearance. This type of fat isn’t a store of energy; rather it helps to burn off stored energy (white fat). Babies and animals that hibernate naturally have a lot of brown fat. Adults with more brown fat are slimmer and generally more physically fit than others.
White fat is the stuff to be afraid of. It’s a single lipid without all those blood vessels, so it appears white or yellow when you look at it up close. (This deserves a big “don’t try this at home” warning! Never try to look at your fat cells unless a doctor has a reason for showing them to you.) White fat stores energy and while you need some for padding and heat control, you don’t need a lot of it.
Surprisingly, there’s a link between hot sauces and both brown and white fats. The research was undertaken last year shows that capsaicin may have the power to transform your white fat into brown fat cells.
Wow!
You can make your stored energy into a fat-burning machine? Yep! Well, it was shown to convert white fat into brown fat in laboratory animals at any rate. But, there’s reason to believe the same process will apply to humans. After all, capsaicin also triggers the hormones that communicate fullness to the brain. It increases metabolism, and it also acts thermogenically to burn food and fat cells faster. So yeah, turning bad fat into good fat in humans is rather likely.
There are a few things already known to make your bad fats into good fats. The most obvious is the one that people like the least – exercise. But that’s not all. You can also get plenty of sleep (like newborns and hibernating animals) and do it in a slightly colder room (your body needs to work harder to keep itself warm).
But if you’re looking for another food source, you’ll need to turn towards apples. Researchers have found that the ursolic acid found in apple peels also boosts brown fat in the body. Oh yeah, you can also make sure you eat just enough to stave off hunger without overeating. It’s tough, but it is just another one of those things that Mad Dog can help you with. It turns out capsaicin really can give you more good fat – may be better than anything but exercise.