“Brown fat”: More way too early weight loss news

A weekend editorial in the New York Times mentions the recent news about so-called “brown fat” that apparently burns calories a zillion times faster than ordinary white fat in the adult body, and notes that this fat seems more active in lab animals when they are put into very cold conditions.  The possibly tongue-in-cheek advice is to drop the temp in your house to 61 degrees.

Of course, this is a fairly common kind of news article, and so perhaps it’s a good time to talk about one of the minor hassles of working on weight loss: the abundance of junk science, bad advice and just plain stupidity that we have to put up with.

There are really two different kinds of things you’ll see in the news and on internet ads that flow from early hints of medical findings.  The two more or less fuel each other.  On the one hand, there will be about fifty thousand articles on the “brown fat discovery” (“!!!!!”) that will be published this year.  This is publications trying to be trendy, and knowing that readers are always hungry for big news about their weight loss concerns.  Basically, any news, however useless, is good filler.  (And most important to editors, it sells magazines — and so gives them advertising revenue.)  Whether or not the news is actually useful, or even accurate, is of lesser importance.