“Exercise capacity diminishes as you get older, and to have a technique that could enhance exercise performance would be very beneficial for healthful aging,” said Stephen Vatner, university professor and senior author of the study published in Aging Cell.
“This mouse model performs exercise better than their normal littermates,” he added.
Unlike white fat, which stores energy, brown fat burns calories and helps regulate body temperature. This study revealed brown fat also plays a crucial role in exercise capacity by improving blood flow to muscles during physical activity.
The genetically modified mice produced unusually high amounts of active brown fat and showed about 30 per cent better exercise performance than normal mice, both in speed and time to exhaustion.