Abstract： Obesity has become a major public health problem and is the consequence of a long-term imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure. There are three kinds of body fat tissue. White adipose tissue are specialized to store energy, maintaining body temperature and participating in adipose metabolism. Brown adipose tissue can produce heat under external stimulation, and thus protects against cold temperature, rare in adults, but abundant in hibernating animal and in newborns. When mice are exposed to cold or
β-adrenergic agonists, some brown-fat-like cells were observed in the subcutaneous white adipose depot, called beige cells. Browning is
regarded as a possible method for increasing energy expenditure. Exercise has numerous physiological benefits on human health, more recently it has been demonstrated that exercise, through a range of mechanisms, induces a phenotypic switch in adipose tissue from energy storing white adipocytes to thermogenic brown adipocytes, browning is thus of great interest as a potential method to treat obesity and associated metabolic disorders. At present, main factors that can regulate browning of white fat are irisin, fibroblast growth factor 21 and interleukin-6, and in clinical practice, intermittent fasting was proven to promote white adipose browning and decrease obesity by regulating
gut microbiota. The present review discusses mechanism of various factors that regulate browning of white adipose during exercise in order to provide new ideas for clinical weight loss.
