By Dr W van Marken Lichtenbelt and Dr B Brans
It was as long ago as in 1551 that the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner described brown adipose tissue in marmots and called it “neither fat nor flesh”. It was not until 1895 that it began to be called brown fat, and this lasted until the 1960s before the main physiological function of this fatty tissue was finally identified: namely the production of heat. Thus, brown adipose tissue (BAT) uses