Three cool things I bet you didn’t know they did.
1 They serve as hormone control center:
Your fat cells secrete estrogen, adiponectin, and leptin (which signal to your brain that you’ve had enough food).
2 Once you’re an adult, you almost always have fixed number of fat cells in your body:
We often talk about gaining or losing fat, but what’s really happening is that your fat cells – nearly all of which you accumulate in adolescence—-are expanding or shrinking. Because fat cells are still there after you lose weight, it’s all too easy to put weight back on. This is why childhood obesity tees you up for weight struggles when you’re grown. “The heavier you are as a kid, the more fat cells you lay down.”
3 They can suffocate:
When fat cells get too big, not enough oxygen gets in, “which prompts the fat cell to think something is very wrong and go into emergency mode. When this happens, the fat cell stops releasing good hormones (like leptin, the stop-eating hormone) and starts spitting out cytokines, immune cells that cause inflammation.