New Skin Patch Developed To Reduce Belly Fat 

Worried about your love handles? How about a patch that you can put on your skin to burn off your belly fat?

A study just published in the journal ACS Nano offered some promising results testing a fat-reducing patch on mice and it all efforts are on to apply the same technology to humans soon.

For the study, researchers from the University of North Carolina (Yuqi Zhang, Jicheng Yu, Shuangjiang Yu, Jinqiang Wang and Zhen Gu), Columbia University (Qiongming Liu and Li Qiang) designed and placed microneedle patches on mice who were lean and mice who were obese. These patches included many very small needles that can inject drugs or chemicals carried by nanoparticles (very small particles) into and under the skin. The researchers loaded these patches with one of two "browning agents," either rosiglitazone, which is also known as Avandia, or CL316243, which is a beta adrenergic agonist. The mice who wore the browning agent patch ended up having 20% less fat on the side of the patch versus the other side of their bodies. Mice who received the browning agents also had significantly lower fasting blood sugar levels compared to mice who did not.

A browning agent may sound like something you would use in a cooking or art class or maybe a tanning salon. However, in this case, a browning agent refers to something that may convert white fat to brown fat. Such a change is not simply a change in color because fat is more complex than many may think. Fat doesn't simply take up space and jiggle.

As Melinda Wenner Moyer described for Scientific American, two identified types of fat are brown and white. A white fat cell contains a single large oily droplet. By contrast, a brown fat cell contains multiple smaller oil droplets and little "chestnut-colored" engines called mitochondria, which tinge the cells brown and can act as mini-furnaces, burning up the small oil droplets to generate heat. Cold temperatures can trigger brown fat to burn the oil and generate heat, which can help keep babies warm because they can't shiver, in general aren't great at keeping themselves warm and have much more brown fat. While brown fat disappears with age, adults may still have small amounts of remaining brown fat. In a way, what the patch is attempting to do is bring back more "baby fat" which can be melted away.