Andrew Huberman· PhD
The animal studies are longer term & reveal lasting shifts (white to beige (thermogenic) fat conversion etc.)
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
The animal studies are longer term & reveal lasting shifts (white to beige (thermogenic) fat conversion etc.)
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USING DELIBERATE COLD EXPOSURE FOR HEALTH & PERFORMANCE Science Supported Protocols for: • Metabolism & Fat Loss
it takes cells that have very few mitochondria and increases the engine size. It kind of stokes the furnace of those particular cells and actually can change gene expression in those cells.
The metabolic increases of deliberate cold exposure are both acute meaning happening in the short term. When you get into the cold and immediately after, one does experience an increase in core metabolism, you burn some calories, in other words, and while those might not be very significant increases, or I should say they can be statistically significant, but they are not enormously large numbers of calories burned, the longer lasting effects of deliberate cold exposure on metabolism seem to take place by changes that occur in the types of fat that we store in our body and the way that that fat impacts our metabolism at other times throughout the 24 hour cycle.
deliberate cold exposure has also been studied in animal models and in humans in the context of increasing metabolism, even in converting certain fat cells that we call white fat cells, which are the ones where energy is stored, they're the ones that we typically think of as kind of blubbery fat, to beige or brown fat, which is thermogenic fat, meaning that it can increase core body temperature and serves kind of the furnace by which we increase our core metabolism.
deliberate cold exposure can also convert white fat to beige fat and brown fat and lead to these more lasting increases in metabolism.
As life goes on, we tend to lose beige and brown fat, but this mechanism that I'm referring to points to the plasticity of white fat, meaning the ability for white fat to actually convert its identity into this metabolically thermogenetically enhancing form of beige and brown fat.
whereby deliberate cold exposure converts one particular kind of fat cell, the white fat cell, which is a very low metabolic output cell. It's basically a storage site for energy in the body fat cells to a different type of fat cell, which is the beige fat cell called beige because it's actually beige or slightly brown under the microscope, or even to brown fat cells, which are very dark under the microscope and dark because they contain mitochondria and are very metabolically and thermogenetically active.
We can only conclude on the basis of the results of this study that the people that lost body fat were indeed in a caloric deficit, presumably because all other factors were held more or less constant in this group of soldiers, presumably because the deliberate cold exposure itself elevated metabolism, thereby increasing the calories out component of the calories in calories out equation, which of course, governs the rules of weight loss and body fat loss as well.