Freeze your fat away

Freeze your fat away with Cool Shapes

I’ll point out that ‘brown fat’ is a fairly new phenomenon, and appears to be our bodies changing to deal with how fat we’ve been getting in recent years. ‘Encouraging’ it might be a bad thing.

Also: if you are cold, your instinctive response is to eat *more*, to bulk up for winter, and add insulation. More fat, not less. If fat was so easily influenced by cold, then eskimos would look like concentration camp inmates.

Robin Bobcat - 10 October 2010 05:54 AM

If fat was so easily influenced by cold, then eskimos would look like concentration camp inmates.

Yeah that had occured to me also, but then the Inuit ( many of them consider the term “eskimo” derogatory) try to stay warm, not apply cold to their bodies.

And as I said, I couldn’t find their research page ( which sounds like it’s just articles & links they have cherrypicked from the internet, not their own research… no doubt a good thing, since they at least admit they aren’t scientists).

And maybe it’s just me, but I think it’d take more than being an impressionist artist ( oops, I mean a talented impressionist artist) to sell me on the merits of their product…. she could ensure it comes in real kick-ass packaging tho, I suppose.

I found a news story about this here.

Fat-zapping machine freezes away love handles

-New machine can freeze off fat cells
-Costs quarter the price of liposuction

A NEW fat-zapping machine that allows out-of-shape people to have their love handles frozen away has started taking its first customers in Britain.

The painless alternative to liposuction, costing

Yeah.  Somehow I don’t see the Dragon using these any time soon.  
To her, if it isn’t 80F outside, its a “cool autumn/spring day”.

daveprime - 10 October 2010 08:43 PM

To her, if it isn’t 80F outside, its a “cool autumn/spring day”.

I’ll go along with that.

But an impressionist artist!!!!

A talented impressionist artist!!!

What with that credential ( OK they admit “we aren

What kind of fat do animals like bears have?  It seems to me that the cold withering away in the cold would be pretty counterproductive to animals that hibernate all winter. 

Either way, this doesn’t sound very healthy.  Whatever happened to eating less and exercising more? 

Sounds great; can you provide a link to the research & peer-reviewed studies that show this claim is accurate?  All I could find on the website is lots of press releases & testimonials.

Here are the studies that inspired this idea:

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0808949
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0808718
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0810780

As is usual with this sort of thing, there is a slight kernel of truth to the advertisements for this product.  These studies suggest that brown fat has shown some relevance in using up body fat, and cold temperatures seem to relate to that.  However, this product takes this idea (which is still in the investigative stage, by the way) and stretches it far beyond anything realistic.

First, there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, brown fat activity in most people.  If you have weight problems, then you almost certainly don’t have it; it only seems to appear in people who are already thin.  So if you’re overweight, you probably don’t have enough brown fat to do anything.

Brown fat only forms in the area around the upper chest and throat, too, while influencing body fat storage equally all throughout the body.  Putting one of these cold packs on some “trouble spot”, therefore, is not going to somehow shape your body by activating the brown fat in that one spot.

And brown fat doesn’t seem to be all that efficient.  You’d get more and faster results just from exercising and eating right. . .which would also give you more long-lasting benefits.

feotu - 10 October 2010 02:10 AM

. . .but then the Inuit ( many of them consider the term “eskimo” derogatory). . .

The Eskimo/Inuit thing is actually rather complicated.  A large number of Eskimo are not Inuit; while perfectly satisfied to be called Eskimo, they would be insulted to be called Inuit (sort of like calling a Hopi a Sioux, or a Chinese guy Japanese, or a Dutch man German).

Ah ha, here is a sort of simplified summary of those three journal articles.