The Upside Of All These Freezing Temperatures

You know how I always tell you there is an upside to everything, well turns out cold temperatures have one too. New research from the University of Sydney in Australia. suggests shivering with cold may be as effective as exercise at helping you stay slim.

Turns out both exercise and shivering produce a hormones that can stimulate the creation of calorie-burning ‘brown fat’.  Scientists say that adults who have more of this ‘good’ brown fat are slimmer, versus white fat which stores energy. In fact it is believed that 50 grams of brown fat can burn up to 300 calories per day, the same amount of energy stored by 50 grams of white fat.

In the study volunteers reduces the temperatures in their areas until they began to shiver. For most this was about 59 degrees. Once they began to shiver researchers say they also began to produce hormones released from muscles and brown fat to warm you up which is what brown fat is supposed to do.

These hormones fired up the energy-burning rate of human brown fat cells, and the treated fat cells began to emit heat, a hallmark of brown fat function.’ Results showed around 10 to 15 minutes of shivering produced as big a rise in the hormone as an hour of moderate exercise.

The findings are reported in the latest edition of the journal Cell Metabolism.