Dietary supplement may help older adults to keep warm

Do your elderly parents keep the house at 80 degrees? This might help....

https://goo.gl/K8qbfA

Older adults are known to be more sensitive to the cold, and new research has found that a nutritional supplement called L-carnitine might one day be used as a way to jump-start the body's central heating.

As we age, our ability to keep warm as temperatures drop is compromised, leaving older individuals at risk of hyperthermia.

Recently, a study using aging mice - conducted at the University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City - investigated whether or not there was something that could be done to reduce this risk. Led by senior author Claudio Villanueva, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biochemistry, the team focused particularly on fats.

White fat accumulates when we take on too many calories, which puts us at risk of metabolic disease. Brown fat, however, is different; it is rich in mitochondria, and, as temperatures turn frosty, brown fat is activated to generate heat.

In human adults, there is little brown fat to be found. However, in newborns and other animals that need to brave the cold (such as mice), it is much more abundant.

If L-carnitine - a readily available and cost-effective supplement - could be useful for helping older adults to stave off hyperthermia, this would be a considerable breakthrough. Of course, there will need to be further testing.

The fact that humans have considerably less brown fat than mice is likely to be an important factor. However, it is not just older adults that might benefit from this new line of inquiry.

"This work is putting a new face on an old character," says Dr. Simcox. "We're changing how we think about cold-induced thermogenesis."

Recently, there has been a lot of interest in brown fat and how it could potentially be used to combat obesity. Because it burns calories, it is thought that it might be able to burn excess fat.

As Prof. Villanueva explains, "The idea is to increase fuel utilization to drive the energy-demanding process of adapting to the cold. If we can find a way to tell the body to expend more energy than it is taking in, the calories lost can lead to weight loss."