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Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Can Coffee Help with Weight Loss?


Wed 26 Jun 2019 | 09:28 AM
Hana Khaled

A recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports by scientists from University of Nottingham, claimed that drinking a cup of coffee can help with losing weight.

 

Medicine Professor Michael Symonds at University of Nottingham said that "This is the first study in humans to show that something like a cup of coffee can have a direct effect on our brown fat functions. The potential implications of our results are pretty big, as obesity is a major health concern for society and we also have a growing diabetes epidemic and brown fat could potentially be part of the solution in tackling them."

The study revealed that humans and mammals have two different types of fat,'brown' and 'white' fat.

The role of the brown fat (BAT) is to produce body heat for burning calories as energy. While the white is formed because of increased calories in the body.

 

According to a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health, white fat is important for biological procedures, however, excessive amount of this fat might be life threatening.

The study discovered the possibility of using coffee as a stimulation of brown fat.

If caffeine succeeded in doing so; it would play a significant role in reducing diabetes. This way, the body will naturally transform white fat into brown one.

 

Researchers used a thermal imaging technique to spot brown fat and to observe if the body's heat increases after drinking coffee.

Professor Symonds added, "From our previous work, we knew that brown fat is mainly located in the neck region, so we were able to image someone straight after they has a drink to see if the brown fat got hotter."

 

"The results were positive and we now need to ascertain that caffeine as one of the ingredients in the coffee is acting as the stimulus or if there's another component helping with the activation of brown fat. We are currently looking at caffeine supplements to test whether the effect is similar," he explained.