This “good” brown fat is a protein which helps the bones to grow. Researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston have recently discovered that this protein could fight against obesity by burning calories. The protein, called BMP-7, is said to be able to prevent overweight.

Researchers said that their study began from the fact that the two types of cells in the body are brown and white, as the study author Yu-Hua Tseng also stated. The white fat cells are the form of fat which stores energy.

According to these natural biological things, the role of the brown cells is to burn the calories and generating the heat inside the body. These brown fat cells usually disappear in humans until they reach the adult age. “Their precursors still remain the body," as the assistant investigator in Joslin's Section on Obesity and Hormone Action, Tseng, said.

Studying mouse cells in laboratories, researchers have found that BMP-7 also leads the precursor cells to mature brown fat cells. Injecting the protein would treat progenitor cells into mice and this would increase the development of brown fat tissue.

After this experiment, mice developed brown fat cells and gained less weight that the mice who didn’t develop the brown fat cells.

This research was published in “Nature” on August 21 and might lead to extra drugs to treat obesity.

Tseng said that also diet and exercise would be the best choices for weight reduction in the general population. However, for people who are genetically predisposed to obesity, these approaches may have very little effect."