The metabolite succinic acid can affect the body temperature, energy consumption and weight of mice through an undiscovered thermoregulation pathway.
Energy intake greater than consumption often leads to obesity. Generally speaking, there are two main ways to lose weight: one is to reduce food intake and reduce the calories that need to be metabolized; the other is to burn more calories through exercise and other means. Calories are also the "fuel" needed for beige and brown fat. Unlike white fat, which is good at storing energy and easy to accumulate in obese bodies, beige and brown fat cells contain a large number of mitochondria. These mitochondria also generate heat during the different formation of energy molecules. For mammals, beige and brown fat play a very important role in regulating body temperature and keeping out the cold. Mitochondrial heat production can also burn calories, but research shows that it is very difficult to activate beige and brown fat on demand.
Edward Chouchani of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Massachusetts, USA, and his colleagues screened the high content of brown fat and the content of metabolites that increase in low temperature environments, and finally screened the intermediate products of the process of releasing stored energy—— Succinate. When the muscles are trembling, succinic acid will be released into the blood and then absorbed by beige and brown fat cells. Researchers found that succinic acid can increase the local temperature of beige and brown fat in mice; by drinking water mixed with succinic acid, the mice on high-fat diet successfully avoided obesity.
In a related article, Joshua Rabinowitz and others of Princeton University in New Jersey pointed out that it would be very meaningful to further verify whether succinic acid can also promote fat burning in the human body, and emphasized that the difference between mice and humans lies in the brown color in the human body. And beige fat is relatively small, and will decrease with age. The researchers therefore reminded that this difference may limit the extent to which calorie expenditure can be altered by activating brown fat metabolism.