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Mice given irisin lost a few grams in the first 10 days after treatment, the study shows, and certain genes involved in powering the cell were turned on. Irisin also appeared to reduce the damage done by a high-fat diet, protecting mice against diet-induced obesity and diabetes, according to the paper, whose first author is Pontus Boström.

Here's a scenario: a lab mouse weighs about 20 grams. We'll take "a few grams" to be at least 3 grams. Over the course of 10 days, the mouse lost 15 percent of its weight, replaced by a smaller amount of brown fat that is so metabolically active in a futile cycle that it was able to burn up 15% of the mouse's weight in body fat. So for a 200 pound guy, this would be equivalent to 30 pounds of fat. At 3500 kilocalories per pound, that's 105,000 kilocalories, or 10,500 kilocalories/day.

Unless someone finds a way to up or down-regulate the futile cycle in these brown fat cells, they will continue to metabolize fat at that rate. Given that the majority of the body's metabolic energy for basal and resting metabolism (including that of skeletal muscles) comes from fat, those brown fat cells will be competing for dietary fat once stored body fat is depleted. So in order to have enough fat to fuel BMR and RMR, the guy would have to consume his normal amount of fat in about a 2,000 kilocalorie diet (and a lot more if he's physically very active) plus another 10,500 kilocalories of fat to fuel the futile cycle of the brown fat cells, lest they rob him of the fat needed to maintain basic life function.

This would mean that his energy costs (food) would increase by over 500% (10,500/2,000= 5.25). Depending on how many people got this as a treatment for obesity (say half the population, since about half the population is supposed to be "obese"), the nation's food industry, including farming, would have to be geared up incredibly to meet the demand.

This would have an impact on use of electricity and fuel to process, store, transport, and sell all that food. It would also have an impact on someone's food budget by increasing it more than fivefold for each brown fattie.

The increased metabolism of these brown fat cells is dissipated as heat. So this would have an impact on clothing (you'd need much less of it), on winter heating bills (it would be less since you'd feel a lot warmer since keeping the individual warm without shivering is the function of brown fat in small mammals--unless you had a mixed family in which you'd probably have to have separate, much cooler rooms for the brown fatties), in the summer, though, you'd have to have much higher cooling bills.

I'm sure there would be protest groups decrying the horrible waste involved in a 500% increase in food for a certain number of individuals only for the purpose of getting rid of some fat when people elsewhere in the world are starving.

And all for what? Just to burn stored energy in a futile cycle to produce heat so that people who already consume more than their bodies need can look like someone who does not by burning five times the amount of food energy.