Shivering with cold for ten minutes may help people lose weight because it may help burn as many calories equivalent to an hour's worth of exercise, a recent study finds.
This is because shivering produces hormones that stimulate the creation of calorie-burning 'brown fat' and adults possess 'good' brown fat. They have also found that people who have more of it are much slimmer than those who don't. Brown fat is known for burning down energy while white fat, on the other hand, stores it.
"We identified two hormones that are stimulated by cold - irisin and FGF21 - released from shivering muscle and brown fat respectively," said study leader Dr. Paul Lee, from Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research. "These hormones fired up the energy-burning rate of human brown fat cells in the laboratory, and the treated fat cells began to emit heat, a hallmark of brown fat function." The researchers confirmed that around ten to 15 minutes of shivering produced a huge rise in irisin which is equivalent to an hour of moderate exercise.
"Excitement in the brown fat field has risen significantly over the last few years because its energy-burning nature makes it a potential therapeutic target against obesity and diabetes. White fat transformation into brown fat could protect animals against diabetes, obesity and fatty liver. Glucose levels are lower in humans with more brown fat." Participants involved in the study published in the journal Cell Metabolism were exposed to increasing levels of cold, with temperatures down to 15 degrees Celsius, until they began to shiver.
Dr. Lee does not suggest ditching the gym altogether in favor of shivering in the cold. "While it's true that one will burn more energy (shivering), but it's also a stress to the body," he said.
