What Color is Your Fat?

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When it comes to your diet, you've hopefully heard about choosing healthy fats (like olive oil, avocado, and nuts) over not-so-healthy ones (like butter and lard). But it turns out that the fat stored in your body isn't all created equal, either.

Recently, scientists have reported that the healthiest fat in your body is brown fat. The worst kind: yellow fat. How can you tell the difference, and why does it matter? I asked. James R. Lyons, MD, author of "The Brown Fat Revolution" to explain:

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What's the difference between brown and yellow fat?

There's a whole spectrum of fat, with brown being the most firm and yellow being almost liquid. People who have more brown fat tend to be healthier and look more youthful. That's because brown fat is dense and firm. It tightly adheres to the underlying bone or muscle and supports the overlying skin. Yellow fat is greasy and is barely held together by connective tissue. It hangs off of the bone of muscle and does not support the overlying skin.

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Without having surgery, how can you tell what kind of fat you have in a particular area?

If you can lift it easily off of the underlying muscle or if your skin looks wrinkled because fat has moved to a place where you do not need or want it—for example, a jowl, an expanding waist, a jiggly arm—that is yellow fat. If you look at a face and the contour created by the skin, fat, muscle and bone are in a symphony of position to create attractive, youthful contours, that is brown fat. It's much better to have brown fat than to have too little fat. We've all seen someone has lost a tremendous amount of weight but who looks old, deflated, tired. Their face looks old and the body looks wasted not toned and youthful. Women need fat to look good. Their faces need fat (volume) to look young and healthy. Their bodies need fat to look sexy and womanly!

Can you turn yellow fat into brown fat?

You can't turn one into the other, but you can shed yellow fat and at the same time build brown fat. That's what "The Brown Fat Revolution" is designed to do. It's the first mainstream cycling diet, which teaches you how to alternate between days of higher and lower carbohydrate intake. Carb/protein cycling promotes the accumulation of brown fat, which makes you look firm, toned, and youthful.

For more info, check out www.thebrownfatrevolution.com

—Barbara Brody, Health Editor

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