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With the rising number of obese people, researchers are constantly working on various ways to fight the epidemic. From lack of exercise to excess food intake, the reasons and causes of more and more people falling into the category of being overweight or obese are many, including genetic factors.

"The body's fat reserves are actually used as a place to store energy that allows surviving lean times," says Prof. Dr. Alexander Pfeifer, Director of the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology of the University of Bonn according to Medicalnewstoday.com. "But nowadays, hardly anyone in the industrialized nations is exposed to such hunger phases anymore."

Since many people consume more food than their body actually requires, the food ends up as fats.A magic pill to burn excess fats has become the need of the hour.

Prof. Pfeifer - in collaboration with colleagues and from the PharmaCenter Bonn, together with the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried - discovered a signal path in the metabolism of mice which is able to greatly boost combustion inside their bodies.

"Science distinguishes between three different types of fat," reports Pfeifer. White fat is used to store energy and is found in the 'problem zones' of overweight people whereas brown fat cells are used as a kind of heating unit, he said.

"In babies, they make sure that they do not lose too much heat."

However, in adults, there are hardly any brown fat cells.

The third category,  the so-called "beige fat cells,"are the ones the researchers are working on.

"Just like brown fat cells, they are efficient at converting energy from food into heat, and they can form the undesirable white fat cells," explains Pfeifer.

The researchers also focused on how to convert white fat cells into as many beige ones as possible.

"The issue was finding a way to brown white fat - of course, not in a skillet, but directly inside the body," the University of Bonn pharmacologist explained.

In 2009, Pfeifer's team had found that brown fat needs the neurotransmitter 'cGMP', which according to the latest study, is also true for beige fat. In this study on mice, the researchers studied the origin and regulation of cGMP in the body.

These studies showed that vasodilator-stimulated phosphoprotein (VASP) is significant for switching on a signal path that slows down the formation of brown and beige fat cells, the report said.

"This is why mice in which the gene for forming VASP was switched off have the more active brown and beige fat," Pfeifer was quoted as saying by Medicalnewstoday.com.

"These animals are lean and dissipate more energy. This might even allow us to talk the white fat cells into converting to brown or beige fat," says the University of Bonn researcher. "This might lead to a useful option for successfully treating obesity."

"But this is still a long way off. So far, this signal path has been described in mice only. "We will have to see first if this is also successful in humans," says Pfeifer, and added that this was just basic research that could open up new possibilities.