This is why you gain more weight in winter – and the simple trick to shed pounds faster
EVER noticed you tend to gain more weight in winter, no matter how hard you try to keep it off?
There's a surprising culprit and it's not the extra calories in your comfort food - the lack of sunshine could actually be making you fat.
While looking for ways to promote the production of insulin through fat cells in the body, in an attempt to treat type 1 diabetes, a team of researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada accidentally discovered that fat cells beneath the skin tend to shrink under sunlight.
Senior author Peter Light, director of the university's diabetes institute, said: "We noticed the reaction in human tissue cells in our negative control experiments, and since there was nothing in the literature, we knew it was important to investigate further."
Light and his team of researchers then took samples of fat cells from patients undergoing weight loss surgery and found that the sun's blue light - the light we can see that boosts our mood and attention - shrunk the cells.
"When the sun’s blue light wavelengths—the light we can see with our eye—penetrate our skin and reach the fat cells just beneath, lipid [fat] droplets reduce in size and are released out of the cell," he added.
"In other words, our cells don’t store as much fat.
"It’s early days, but it’s not a giant leap to suppose that the light that regulates our circadian rhythm, received through our eyes, may also have the same impact through the fat cells near our skin."
The sun's blue light is the light that directs our circadian rhythm - the body's natural clock that tells us when to wake up and when to sleep.
The same blue light is emitted from smartphones and other electronic devices, which is why we are told not to look at them before we go to sleep as it triggers our body's waking up process.
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"Perhaps that pathway - exposure to sunlight that directs our sleep-wake patterns - may also act in a sensory manner, setting the amount of fat humans burn depending on the season," Light added.
"You gain weight in the winter and then burn it off in the summer."
Dr Charles Allard, chair of Diabetes Research, added: "If you flip our findings around, the insufficient sunlight exposure we get eight months of the year living in a northern climate may be promoting fat storage and contributing to the typical weight gain some of us have over winter."