“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.
The second major result of these things will be premature quack cures and recommendations. Odds are high we’ll be seeing books on “the brown fat cure” that involve freezing yourself every day or God knows what kinds of weird recommendations. Somebody, somewhere, is surely trying to figure out a way to claim that their magical protein supplement drink (basically soy milk, probably) “may increase brown fat — the kind that burns calories fast!” Even while you sleep, somebody is out there trying to pick your pocket.
This kind of thing is far from new. Two thousand years ago the Greek physician Hippocrates, often called the “father of medicine,” wrote an essay called “On ancient medicine.” In it, he complained of the same thing happening in the medical practice of his time. Namely, people would get a little bit of fact and spin wild theories around it. Then they would base their practice (or nowadays, self-help articles, sales pitches for supplements, and editorials in the Times) on these theories, made mostly of empty air.
The problem, Hippocrates pointed out, was that the theories may be wrong, wrong, wrong. Or even lethally wrong, wrong, wrong. Until you actually try things out, gather data, look to see if something actually helps, you don’t know anything. And you are foolish to think you do. (Which was why, even 1800 years after Hippocrates, George Washington was almost certainly hastened to his death by well-meaning physicians who continued to use ancient methods based, literally, on ancient theories of “bodily humors,” such as by “bleeding” him profusely after he caught a chill while riding on a cold, wet day.)
The field of weight control and health recommendations are rich in this kind of mistake. Not many years ago, for instance, diabetics were being advised to go on high carbohydrate, low fat diets. The reason was not based on research (at least, not research on how that diet actually affected diabetics), but on the theory that carbs were good for people and fat was bad. So dieticians around the country dutifully had diabetics cutting fat and increasing grains. Until it was found that this was just about the worst thing you can do for blood sugar control. In fact, it was found, a bit more fat might give you better control over your blood sugars, and that diets heavy in even whole wheat bread can lead to blood sugar surges.
My advice for now on the brown fat issue: ignore it. Every article you read about that stuff is five minutes you could be using to take a walk or write down what you ate for breakfast, or just enjoying the sunshine. An essential psychological strategy for weight control projects is to keep focused on the few things that will give you the best results — then live your life to the fullest with the rest of your time.
[...] I wrote about the problem we face when confronted with medical reporting on weight-loss related matters. [...]