Fighting obesity with thermal imaging

Scientists at The University of Nottingham believe they’ve found a way of fighting obesity — with a pioneering technique which uses thermal imaging. This heat-seeking technology is being used to trace our reserves of brown fat — the body’s ‘good fat’ — which plays a key role in how quickly our body can burn calories as energy.

This special tissue known as Brown Adipose Tissue, or brown fat, produces 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body. Potentially the more brown fat we have the less likely we are to lay down excess energy or food as white fat.

Michael Symonds, Professor of Developmental Physiology in the School of Clinical Sciences, led a team of scientists and doctors at The University of Nottingham who have pioneered the thermal imaging process so we can assess how much brown fat we’ve got and how much heat it is producing. Their research has just been published in the Journal of Pediatrics.

Source:

The University of Nottingham

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