“Fat is beauty” and can be, after all, a sign of vitality. The evidence that our body fat helps everything from bone health to mood is mounting. A new study suggests it also regulates blood pressure and immunity.
If you have the idea that the body fat it was just a passive calorie storage deposit, maybe you should rethink it.
A study last week in Cell Metabolism suggests that, after all, body fat plays a important role in our overall health.
As explained by , fat exists in several forms. For example, there is white fat, which stores energy and releases hormones that influence metabolism; brown fat, which generates heat; and beige fat, which lies somewhere between the two, activating heat production under certain conditions.
It was already known that, even within these categories, location matters: fat under the skin is generally less harmfulwhile fat deep inside the abdomen — known as visceral fat — is strongly associated with inflammation, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
More recent research adds more substance to this picture, suggesting that fat, or adipose tissue, actively helps regulate blood pressure and coordinate immune responses in key locations.
The aforementioned study mapped the cellular architecture of visceral fat from multiple locations within the abdomen. It turned out that the Epiploic fat, which surrounds the large intestine, is unusually rich in immune cells, as well as specialized fat cells that produce inflammatory proteins associated with immune activation.
Additional experiments showed that microbial products originating in the intestine trigger the activation of these fat cellscausing them to activate nearby immune cells.
But pay attention!
In obesity, however, this system can become chronically overactivated.. Eating too much or too much of certain foods and having specific bacterial compositions in the gut microbiome can potentially lead to persistent immune signaling in intestinal fat, contributing to low-grade inflammation associated with a number of metabolic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes and obesity.
A second study, in the journal Sciencerevealed another unexpected role of fat: blood pressure control.
Here, we sought to understand why obesity, characterized by excess white fat, is associated with hypertension, while brown fat and beige fat appear to be protective.
As New Scientist details, this focused on perivascular adipose tissue, a layer of fat rich in beige fat cells that surrounds blood vessels. In mice genetically modified to lose their beige fat, blood vessels became more rigid and overreacted to everyday hormonal signals that constrict arteries, leading to high blood pressure.
The team traced this effect to an enzyme called QSOX1released by dysfunctional fat cells. Blocking this enzyme prevented damage to blood vessels and normalized blood pressure in rats, regardless of their body weight.
“[O estudo] underscores the need for a more nuanced understanding of the health impacts of adipose tissue, regardless of fat mass or overall body mass index (BMI),’ Kristy Townsend of Ohio State University in Columbus told New Scientist.
The results point to future therapies that focus less on simply reducing fat and more on preserving or restoring its beneficial functions by targeting specific fat deposits, modulating communication between the immune system and fat, or maintaining healthy beige fat activity.
