Easy weight loss always comes with a catch. A widely taken plant extract has helped obese mice burn off the calories without exercise ā but there are concerns over its safety.
The fight against obesity gained ground in 2009 with the news that our bodies carry small deposits of brown adipose tissue ā a type of fat that burns calories by turning energy into heat. Since then, researchers have been looking for ways to ramp up brown fat activity to realise the dream of weight loss without exercise or counting calories.
Enter berberine. A plant extract found in many Chinese herbal medicines, it has been . at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine have now shown that it helps weight control in obese mice by both activating brown fat and helping turn ordinary white fat brown.
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Weight control
Ningās team gave the mice berberine every three days for a month. Scans showed that the brown fat between the rodentās shoulder blades burned more calories than that in mice not given the extract. There were also signs that the white fat in their groin had begun to act like brown fat. As a result, the mice fed a high-fat diet had better control over their weight.
Itās a top quality bit of research, says at the University of Helsinki in Finland. āIt nicely brings together some earlier isolated findings in a comprehensive package.ā
Whether berberine can help obese people control their weight is a different matter, though. Thereās been a lot of hype over the promise of brown adipose tissue, says at the Institute of Metabolic and Cardiovascular Diseases in Toulouse, France. āBut it remains true that adult humans, even lean ones, have much lower brown adipose capacity and ābrowningā capacity than rodents.ā
Toxic to rodents
This might not stop people with obesity from taking berberine, though. āMy understanding is that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who use berberine,ā says Huttunen. That might be a bad idea, though. A few weeks ago, Huttunenās team published a paper in which they detail evidence of a , which raises concerns about its safety for human use.
āIf this was a pharmaceutical we would begin by showing itās safe and then looking at efficacy,ā says Huttunen. āBut because itās a supplement thereās much less concern about the safety ā which I find a bit disturbing.ā
Ning points out that people have been taking berberine in China for 2000 years but agrees itās imperative to test its safety profile. āToxicology must be studied for the long-term application in obesity treatmentā, he says.
Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI:
