After walking your meal to lose weight

If you’re looking for a way to lose weight, you could do worse than going for a walk in the cold after your meal.

That’s because new research shows that low temperatures encourage the body to burn calories.

The cold specifically activates brown fat, a ‘good fat’ which is known to burn calories in order to generate heat – a process known as non-shivering thermogenesis.

The question on scientists’ minds has been how to activate this brown fat on cue. Scientists at the Joslin Diabetes Center have been examining whether the drug ephedrine could be used to trigger this calorie-burning process.

While their work showed them that ephedrine was not a suitable activating agent, their work opened up new avenues of exploration, specifically how the cold – or agents that mimic the cold – could fight obesity.

The ephedrine study kitted out volunteers in cooling vests (containing water at 57F) and injected them with either ephedrine or saline. After measuring their fat activity, researchers discovered the brown fat was the same for both sets of participants, proving ephedrine was not the trigger they had hoped.

However, it was noticed that brown fat activity increased significantly after wearing a cooling vest for two hours, proving that only the cold activated the brown fat.

Dr Aaron Cypess concluded: “Mild cold exposure stimulates (brown fat) energy expenditure with fewer other systemic effects, suggesting that cold activates specific sympathetic pathways.

“Agents that mimic cold activation of (brown fat) could provide a promising approach to treating obesity while minimising systemic effects.”

A future study will ask volunteers to wear the vests for several weeks.

“Will they get the same health benefits they would have seen with several weeks of exercise? That’s the billion dollar question,” asked Dr Cypess.

The results could lead to a potential way to tackle obesity, such as providing the overweight with cooling vests of their own to help them burn calories and lose weight.