STUDY: Coffee For New Diet?

I love coffee as much as the next person. Okay, maybe more. With the wicked hour that I wake up at (3:30a), I really need it to stay awake and alive in the morning. Plus I just think it's delicious, so I enjoy one cup a day at work. Sometimes I'll make it at home on the weekends. But can coffee help you lose weight? A new study suggests so.

A new study published in Scientific Reports found that drinking coffee spurs the human body on to burn calories. UPI notes that the coffee helps galvanize the body's so-called "brown fat," or "a heat-generating form of fat that literally burns calories in a process called thermogenesis." Michael Symonds, who led the study from the University of Nottingham, noted in a news release that "the potential implications of our results are pretty big, as obesity is a major health concern for society and we also have a growing diabetes epidemic and brown fat could potentially be part of the solution in tackling them." However, a registered dietitian named Sharon Zarabi told UPI that people shouldn't start replacing exercise with copious trips to Starbucks.