The sleep diet: Can cooler bedrooms improve metabolism?
Sleep is essential for good health, but a new study suggests there may be an easy way to augment its virtues: lower the thermostat. Cooler bedrooms could subtly transform a person’s stores of brown fat — “good fat” — and alter energy expenditure and metabolic health, even into daylight hours.
Until recently, most scientists thought that adults had no brown fat. But in the past few years, scanty deposits — teaspoonfuls, really — of the tissue have been detected in the necks and upper backs of many adults. This is important because brown fat, unlike the more common white fat, is metabolically active. Experiments with mice have shown that brown fat takes sugar out of the bloodstream to burn calories and maintain core temperature.
