Health Medicine Network - Come fall, being a bear starts to look better and better. They load up on fat, sleep the winter away and wake up hungry.
The medical and science communities have a wealth of information about white fat and its adverse effects. They don't know as much about brown fat, how the human body produces it and what steps people can take to increase the amount of brown fat in their bodies, thus lowering their risk of heart disease, diabetes and obesity. A Texas Tech University researcher is working to fill in that knowledge gap thanks in part to a grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary Integrative Health (NCCIH).
Naima Moustaid-Moussa, director of the Obesity Research Cluster and a professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, received official notice that she won a grant from the NCCIH under award number R15AT008879. Her co-investigator in this grant is Latha Ramalingam, a research assistant professor in Moustaid-Moussa's Nutrigenomics, Inflammation Obesity Research Laboratory. Nishan Kalupahana, a professor at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka and an adjunct professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and doctoral candidate Mandana Pahlavani also have been actively working on this project, for which a manuscript was just accepted for publication in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.
Read the full story here.