--- title: Fat-Burning Gene: How to Make Your Fat Work Harder to Lose Weight description: Scientists have identified a gene that may get rid of excess fat without the diet and exercise. canonical: https://time.com/4003974/gene-burns-fat/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-08-19T22:33:56.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:58:05.519Z article:section: Health og:title: A Fat-Burning Gene May Help Weight Loss og:description: Scientists have identified a gene that may get rid of excess fat without the diet and exercise. og:url: https://time.com/4003974/gene-burns-fat/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta848c09325a292cd/698860258e0601a685461f94/gettyimages-109230578.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 5001 og:image:height: 2813 og:image:alt: 109230578 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: A Fat-Burning Gene May Help Weight Loss twitter:description: Scientists have identified a gene that may get rid of excess fat without the diet and exercise. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta848c09325a292cd/698860258e0601a685461f94/gettyimages-109230578.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # A Fat-Burning Gene May Help Weight Loss > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=9b553845-2a98-4e1d-a0ee-999795c978c3&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Truth About Fat [Watch (HLS stream): The Truth About Fat](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/uYGhfNfS.m3u8) (5:15)  _Published 2014-06-12. When you want to lose weight or get healthy, what is the first thing you would normally cut from your diet? If you said fat, you're not alone_  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Aug 19, 2015 10:33 PM UTC  Holiday Desserts Go Here Holiday Desserts Go Here Allen Donikowski—Getty Images/Flickr RF  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Aug 19, 2015 10:33 PM UTC A Holy Grail of fat—one that can turn more quickly into energy and melt away without building up in those unwanted bulges—is actually backed by some intriguing evidence. The trouble is, it’s hard to find in most adults. It turns out we have more of the less desirable kind, the white fat that accumulates around the middle and in our tissues, that potentially leads to dangerous health problems. Now, scientists reporting in the _New England Journal of Medicine_ report that they have connected the dots between the strongest gene associated with obesity and a way to make white fat more active. The idea is to literally give white fat fewer couch potato tendencies and help it more actively burn energy, more like the so-called brown fat that’s in such short supply. **MORE:** [This New Drug Turns ‘Bad’ White Fat Into ‘Good’ Brown Fat](http://time.com/3736916/white-brown-fat-weight-loss-study-gc-1/) The researchers, led by Melina Claussnitzer and senior author Manolis Kellis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, say that the key lies in an intermediate type of fat that experts have dubbed “beige fat”. While brown fat, often found in higher amounts in newborns and concentrated in the parts of cells that are responsible for generating energy, comes from entirely different cellular lineages than white fat, beige fat and white fat share more in common. By studying cells from people with mutations in an obesity gene called FTO, Kellis found that their cells contained certain mutations that inhibited the formation of beige fat. But by manipulating the mutations, he was able to both turn white fat cells into beige cells as well as increase the proportion of early fat cells that developed into beige cells (rather than white fat). **MORE:** [Why Brown Fat May Be the Key to Weight Loss](http://time.com/3482856/brown-fat-weight-loss/) The net effect is a composition of fat cells that is more amenable to generating energy and heat, and less inclined to sequester into fat stores. Kellis further tested the theory by manipulating the genes in question in mice, and found that they could adjust the amount of obesity or leanness by reformulating the proportions of white and beige fat cells. In fact, they can reduce the amount of white fat by a factor of seven, give or take. “What these results say is that we can reprogram all the major fat stores in humans by intervening in this particular pathway,” he says. “We can manipulate the process that makes \[pre-fat\] cells become either white fat cells or beige fat cells. That dramatically changes the picture.” Fat cells take about four to five days to fully mature from pre-fat cells, and by intervening in this process, it may be possible to tip the balance in favor of the more energy-consuming beige fat over the fat-storing white fat. The next step will be to manipulate these genes and this pathway in human patients—likely those who carry the mutations that predispose them to obesity—to see if the intervention has an effect on their weight and fat composition. ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] There's something we all enjoy about staying for dinner. You ever thought why? What was on your dinner table when you were younger? Chances are it had a lot to do with, what your doctor was telling you is healthy. Building a strong healthy body is like building a strong, beautiful building. If the foundation is weak, the whole building will be weak. It takes five fingers to point the way to healthful eating habits. Well, here we go. For years, the government published dietary guidelines. Meant to keep Americans healthy. There's a great deal to learn. Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are. The body needs certain substances to live and grow. And remember, your body isn't just like an automobile. For years, the key measures of those guidelines were the same, cut fat from your diet. The committee's original report urged Americans to reduce their risk of heart attack. By reducing their intake of cholesterol down to the equivalent of about one egg a day. And those guidelines had an effect. From 1977 to 2012, per capita consumption of eggs fell by 9 %, beef by 37 %, whole milk by 72 %. Calories from saturated fat fell, while calories from supposedly safe carbohydrates increased. As one expert put it, it was a vast nutritional experiment. With nearly a million American's a year dropping dead from heart disease in the mid 80s, we had to try something. Nearly four decades later results are in. The experiment was a failure. Americans are sicker than they've ever been before. The prevalence of diabetes has gone up 157 % from 1980 to 2011. Nearly one in ten Americans now has the disease. Causing the public health system $ 245 billion a year. Heart disease is still the number one killer in the country. Americans are as obese as ever. So, what went wrong? Good old granola. Great for taste but loaded with fat. It doesn't take much of imagine a leap to assume that fat would make us fat, clog our arteries and raise the risk of heart disease. It turns out that saturated fat is a lot more complicated than we think. Carbohydrates and fats are nutrients. Like man, you need nutrients to live and grow. [ MUSIC ] Firstly, there are two kinds of cholesterol. LDL which is linked to heart disease and HDL which can be protective. Fats that course through the blood are known as triglycerides and high levels of those are linked to heart disease. Saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol but also raises HDL. Moving LDL buildup on arterial walls. So raising both, makes saturated fat a cardio wash. One key piece of information is that LDL seems to come in two forms. Large and fluffy, small and dense. Those smaller particles are linked to heart disease, while the larger ones are mostly benign. Saturated fat increases the number of large particles. The opposite happens with carbs. I don't get it. Researchers have long since discovered the kind of fats found in olives and in fish like salmon. Are actually heart protective. Now it turns out the fats found in meat and dairy, aren't as bad as we feared before. So that means by focusing so much on fats. We may actually have been making ourselves sicker. So, she brings up the subject of reduced- fat cheese. It's a fat- free [ UNKNOWN ]. Fat- free, cholesterol free. Low- fat granola. Reduced- fat Kettle chips. Reduced- fat Chips Ahoy. Lowfat cottage cheese. Non- fat yogurt is the perfect example. The thinking for consumers was simple. Fat was dangerous. This product had no fat. Therefore, it must be healthy. It's non- fat, which means less calories. [ MUSIC ] But amid the confusion about fat, we end up replacing it in our diets with sugars and carbohydrates, which meant our calorie intake was actually going up. When carbs and things like corn and white bread are ingested into your body, their converted into sugars. Those sugars convert to insulin cuz it's fat cells go into storage overdrive, leading to weight gain. Since fewer calories are then left to fill the body, you begin to feel hungry it means our metabolism begins to slow down in effort to save energy, we eat more and we gain more weight, never quite feeling full. As this process repeats, our cells become more resistant to insulin, which causes us to gain more weight, which increases insulin resistance in a vicious circle. Cut calories, and people just get hungrier. Obesity, diabetes, high triglycerides and low HDL cholesterol can all follow. Study after study has found it's very difficult to lose weight on a very low- fat diet. Possibly because fat and meat can produce a sense of satiety, that's hard to achieve with carbs, making it easier to simply stop eating. But it isn't just the increase in carbs that affects us. These processed, low saturated fat alternatives, come loaded with sugars, salt, preservatives, and even some unhealthy fats. So what's the real alternative? As one extra puts it, the cold hard truth about diet is that the only way to eat well, is to eat well. You'll be happier and you'll be healthier, if you focus on real whole foods, whether they have fat or not. Got it. And thanks, we'll never forget what we've learned. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4003974/gene-burns-fat/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4003974/gene-burns-fat/"},"headline":"A Fat-Burning Gene May Help Weight Loss","datePublished":"2015-08-19T22:33:56.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:58:05.519Z","description":"There are many ways to get rid of excess fat, most of them involving diet and exercise. 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