Research
Hormonal
Cold acclimation enhances basal GLUT4 translocation to the sarcolemma in skeletal muscle of obese men, facilitating increased glucose uptake.
Cold exposure not only activates brown fat but also improves your muscles' ability to take up glucose by moving glucose transporters (GLUT4) to the cell surface. This happens even in obese individuals and may help maintain better blood sugar control.
ModerateSupportsMEDIUM confidence
enhanced GLUT4 localization at the sarcolemma is consistent with the observation of increased [18F]FDG uptake in SM upon cold acclimation.
Why this rating
Small sample size (n=9 for muscle biopsies), but direct measurement of protein localization provides high mechanistic fidelity.
Source
Short-term Cold Acclimation Recruits Brown Adipose Tissue in Obese Humans
Mark J. W. Hanssen et al. · Diabetes · 2015
DOI 10.2337/db15-1372
rct · n=10Cited 295×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Short-term cold acclimation (10 days of intermittent exposure to 14-15°C) recruits brown adipose tissue (BAT) and enhances skeletal muscle glucose uptake in metabolically healthy obese men.Moderate
- Short-term cold acclimation does not significantly increase non-shivering thermogenesis (NST) or energy expenditure in obese men, despite recruiting BAT.Moderate
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