Could coffee help burn off those calories?

It’s what we’ve all been hoping for. It also seems too good to be true. Drinking coffee would help you lose weight, research suggests.

Scientists found a cup of coffee can stimulate ‘brown fat’ cells – which generate heat by burning excess calories.

These cells have the opposite function of white fat cells, which are used to store excess calories for energy.

Previously scientists thought that brown cells were only found in babies, but recent studies have found that they exist in adults but in varying amounts. Researchers at the University of Nottingham performed stem cell studies to see if coffee – or the caffeine in coffee – could activate brown fat cells.

Once they found an effective dose on stem cells, they ran the tests on humans using a thermal imaging technique that traces the body’s brown fat reserve and assesses its capacity to produce heat – and therefore burn calories. The research continues.