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DTME0511

News & Opinions DENTALTRIBUNE Middle East & Africa Edition4 Although it accounts for only 2% of your total body weight, the fact remains that the brain is a food-hungryorganwithtentimes theappetiteofotherorgans.Inor- der to function, it uses up a mini- mum of 20% of your daily calorie in-take. To ensure your brain gets what it needs there are certain foods you should add to your diet. 1. Oily fish (mackerel, sar- dinessalmon…)forbrainmain- tenance More than 50% of brain mass ismadeupoflipids,andover70% ofthesearefattyacidsthatbelong to the well-known Omega 3 group. These fats are crucial to the production and maintenance of brain cells, preserving the flu- idity of cell membrane. 2. Pulses (lentils, chick- peas...) for brain energy The brain is said to be glu- cose-dependent, which means it uses only glucose to function. It consumes more than 5g an hour, butdoesn’tknowhowtostoreit.It 10foodsto boostyour brainpower  page 5DT Scientists have found a way to turn bad fat into calorie burn- inggoodfat,andsaythediscov- ery could lead to new and bet- ter treatments for obesity. White or ‘bad’ fat typically collectsaroundourwaistsaswell as other parts of the body and stores the extra calories we con- sume. But brown ‘good’ fat, found in abundance in babies, acts like a power source, burning calories and generating heat. By the time weareadults,mostbrownfathas disappeared and been replaced by white fat. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore initially tried to reduce body fat and weight gain in rats by suppress- ingtheproductionofanappetite- stimulating protein called neu- ropeptide Y (NPY) in the part of the brain which helps to regulate hunger and thirst. Thefindingsshowedthatrats treated this way gained less weight after five weeks, com- pared with untreated rats which becameobese,showingthatsup- pressing NPY led to less calories being consumed. However, when the scientists examined the rats with sup- pressed NPY, they discovered that some of their white fat had been replaced with brown fat. Thescientistsspeculatedthat white fat tissue may contain some brown fat cells which be- come activated when NPY is sup- pressed. In the future, it may be possi- ble to transplant or inject brown fat stem cells under the skin to burn white fat and stimulate weightloss,theresearcherssaid. Dr Sheng Bi, at the univer- sity’sschoolofmedicine,wholed theresearchsaid:“Ifwecouldget the human body to turn “bad fat” into“goodfat”thatburnscalories instead of storing them, we could add a serious new tool to tackle the obesity epidemic.” The findings are published in the journal Cell Metabolism DT Scientists turn bad fat into ‘good’ calorie-burning fat