If you’re like most people who depend on caffeine for its marvelous energy boosting properties, you constantly fluctuate between enjoying caffeine and refusing to drink it because of its alleged negatives. Well, this should make your decision making a little bit more difficult, because there is yet another pro for making caffeine a regular part of your diet. Researchers at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom have recently discovered that drinking caffeine may actually help your body fight obesity and diabetes by contributing to the fat burning process.
According to the study’s co-director, Professor Michael Symonds, this study is the first human study that shows a correlation between drinking coffee and the effects on brown fat functions. Brown adipose tissue, also known as “brown fat” produces body heat by burning calories. This tissue is most present in hibernating mammals and babies, but researchers have recently begun discovering it in adult humans. The fat people are most familiar with, “white fat” stores excess calories, but people with a lower body mass index tend to have more brown fat.
When you stimulate brown fat by drinking coffee, it helps to burn off the white fat which can potentially prevent diabetes and obesity. Before now, there was no known method for stimulating brown fat, but researchers have noticed that drinking coffee causes the brown fat to become hotter, which is a sign that it is burning more calories.
The only problem with this new discovery is that researchers are not sure which compound in coffee is exactly responsible for stimulating the brown fat. Caffeine is the most likely culprit, but more research is needed to guarantee this. So, until everything is worked out, keep drinking your coffee, or not.
