A Cold Case Study
Ray Cronise didn't set out to investigate the effects of cold on weight loss—he just wanted to find a way to drop pounds, fast. Caloric restriction and cardio had worked for him in the past, but Cronise was getting impatient with his usual methods. Here's how he added cold to his diet regimen and lost 27 pounds in six weeks, tripling his previous rate of weight loss. If cold speeds up weight loss, and if the effects of cold are the result of an underlying physiological process, then it follows that theoretically you could synthesize a drug to induce that physiological process without ever having to bother with cold exposure.
In other words: a magic diet pill. That possibility is exceedingly enticing to drugmakers.
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More than 30 percent of adults in the US are obese. It's easy to fathom the broad appeal and potential payoff of a weight-loss pill that can activate BAT—or spur its formation in the body. In January , Ember cofounder Bruce Spiegelman, a Harvard professor and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researcher, published the identification of a hormone he named irisin, which transforms white fat into brown fat—a process called browning. Spiegelman dropped another bomb in July: His team isolated a third type of fat cell, one that's neither white nor brown. Dubbed beige fat, this third distinct tissue can be found within white fat cells and functions much like BAT.
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Ember just has to distill all these developments into a pharmaceutical cocktail: a bit of irisin and maybe a dash of the growth factor BMP7 to brown your white fat, then a few other proteins to jump-start the metabolic process that causes energy-burning. Tartaglia isn't wasting time. In September Ember opened a 15,square-foot office with a wet lab in Watertown, Massachusetts, and went on a hiring spree. One of the biggest challenges: finding a way to keep BAT turned on—and burning energy—perpetually.
For now, the only method for stimulating BAT in humans for a meaningful amount of time is cold exposure. Tartaglia says he expects Ember to begin testing its first BAT drugs on primates by the end of But even if all goes according to plan, BAT drugs for humans won't hit the market until at least Critics say the whole effort misses the point. Nevertheless, the race to understand BAT is accelerating. PET scanning exposes patients to radiation. It's also expensive and prone to false negatives.
More than a dozen researchers in the US and abroad are exploring techniques using MRI and infrared cameras. Cronise, the man who kicked off the freeze-yourself-thin fad, doesn't have any NIH funding. He also doesn't care much whether BAT is responsible for his weight loss. His obsession is figuring out how people can most effectively lose weight, not why. And he's concerned that some of his more overzealous acolytes have adopted "stupid crazy" tactics—cold showers, frigid ice baths—that can be uncomfortable, dangerous, and unnecessary.
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Cronise thinks there's a way to lose weight without subjecting your body to such extreme temperatures. Studies have shown that the same thermogenic mechanism used by BAT also occurs in skeletal muscles during cold exposure. Before you shiver, your muscles produce heat—just as BAT does. The findings suggest that exposing yourself to less extreme cold could still be metabolically beneficial—even if you have very little BAT.
Since , Cronise has tried to invent a more user-friendly way for people to tap into the power of cold exposure. By he settled on his ultimate goal: a wearable device that would make it simple for anybody to shed pounds.
It would have a temperature sensor and could connect wirelessly to an app on your laptop. You'd type in what clothes you were wearing and the software would then factor in the ambient temperature and ultimately estimate the net effect on your metabolism. Cronise started by modeling some basic assumptions about the body and creating a unit of measurement he called thermal load. The idea was to boil all the variables down to one simple number that helps people understand the amount of cold exposure they're getting and then approximate its impact on metabolism.
Cronise has filled 10 binders with notes, peer-reviewed journal articles, and data about his own energy-use patterns. He designed a custom air valve in CAD and had it 3-D-printed at the local community college. In March , Cronise turned off his home thermostat, opened his windows, and spent one month letting in the cool outdoor air. He measured his resting metabolic rate every morning.
His body burned He was, in theory, losing weight while he was sleeping. But Cronise wanted better, less anecdotal data.
A Cold Case Study
Scientists are beginning to understand how cold affects metabolism, but they're still not sure which mechanisms really kick your calorie-burning engine into overdrive. One variable is brown adipose tissue, which converts energy from food directly into heat. After a chilly dip in a pool, two people with different levels of active BAT will both get a metabolic boost—but the person with higher levels typically burns even more calories, as shown here. When exposed to cold for two hours, a man with relatively little active BAT burned 35 more calories per hour than usual.
If you keep up that rate all day, staying cool could net you an extra burger or a skipped workout. In people with little or no BAT, this extra burn likely comes from skeletal muscle, which produces heat both before and after you start to shiver. But a man with a lot of active BAT increased his energy expenditure even more after cold exposure, burning an extra 68 calories per hour two burgers!
The more BAT you have, generally the more calories you'll burn when exposed to cold, as the tissue's mitochondria convert caloric energy into heat instead of energy that can be stored as fat. The setup can be calibrated to the environment and quantify the percentage of fat versus carbohydrate that a subject metabolizes.
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Cronise wants to pinpoint how various types of cold exposure burn fat. And he has expanded his selection of test subjects: I'm the fifth person he has analyzed but the first he has subjected to water torture. It's the final day of our experiments in Huntsville. I'm luxuriating in the sun in my Speedo. I finished an degree soak—it was certainly more pleasant than my first degree submersion. I shivered, just nowhere near as long or as violently. Cronise is eager to deconstruct my data.
We're looking at my total energy expenditure and respiratory quotient, or RQ, which reflects what kind of fuel I was burning. Ideally my RQ should stay as close to 0. When RQ shoots up to 1. But sustained fat burning is the goal of cold exposure. Cronise walks me through the graphs. During and after running, cycling, or swinging kettle bells and while I swam, my RQ hovered around 0.
Not good. I was burning carbs instead of just fat. But Cronise assures me that "slobbering in a tube underwater, looking like a bondage slave" was worth it. He points out that my RQ dropped noticeably; I was burning fat steadily every time I exited the pool. After the minute swim in degree water, my RQ averaged 0. Following a minute swim in 60 degrees, I hit 0.
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After that first miserable soak in degree water? The cold had a prolonged effect on my metabolism. The data confirms what Cronise has been saying: Water is an efficient way to force the body to produce a lot more heat for a sustained period of time. If my goal is to burn fat, I'm better off swimming—or even sitting—in San Francisco Bay than jogging or cycling, provided I let my body warm itself naturally afterward no hot showers or sauna allowed. Not for sure. You were definitely burning more calories after cold exposure. But it could also be my muscles burning the calories. For now there's no way to know.