Research
Energy balance
Brown adipose tissue (BAT) contributes to diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT) in humans, with individuals having higher BAT activity showing significantly higher postprandial energy expenditure compared to those with low BAT activity.
Your body burns more calories after eating if you have active brown fat. This is a natural physiological variation. You cannot directly 'take' this, but maintaining a healthy weight and potentially exposing yourself to mild cold may help maintain BAT activity.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
EE after meals was significantly higher in the high BAT group (9.7% of the total energy intake) than in the low BAT group (6.5%)... All these results indicate that BAT contributes to DIT, at least in part, in humans.
Why this rating
The paper cites human calorimetry studies showing significant differences in EE between high and low BAT groups.
Source
Brown Adipose Tissue, Diet-Induced Thermogenesis, and Thermogenic Food Ingredients: From Mice to Men
Masayuki Saito et al. · Frontiers in Endocrinology · 2020
DOI 10.3389/fendo.2020.00222
narrative_reviewCited 234×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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