A bedroom set up is pictured in IKEA's first city centre store in Hamburg
A bedroom set up is pictured in IKEA's first city centre store in Hamburg June 25, 2014. Sweden's IKEA, the world's biggest furniture chain known for its sprawling out-of-town showrooms, is opening its first city centre store as it responds to a shift in shopping habits to smaller local stores and the Internet. While IKEA has already opened a few stores closer to city centres than usual in countries like Britain and Japan, its new building in the northern German port city of Hamburg is the first time it will be in a central pedestrian shopping zone. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer (GERMANY - Tags: BUSINESS) Reuters

Recent research has discovered that a long slumber, as enjoyable as that sounds, when teamed with a cool bedroom could help you lose weight. Bedrooms with a lower thermostat can transform a person's store of brown fat, which is good fat. It increases metabolic rates as well.

Previously unknown, it is now found that adults have brown fat in small quantities near their neck and upper backs. This is not the usual fat that you have heard of, brown adipose tissue is metabolically active and an experiment on mice revealed that it takes sugar out of the blood stream to burn calories to generate heat. Basically, brown fat increases the metabolic rate to maintain a certain temperature of the body, to keep you warm.

A new study published in June in Diabetes was conducted by researchers affiliated with the National Institutes of Health. They made five healthy young male volunteers to sleep in climate-controlled chambers at the NIH. They were asked to continue their normal lives and were provided normal meals to maintain a certain calorie intake; the only difference was they were made to sleep in these regulated chambers from eight o'clock in the night. The experiment went on for four months, in the first month, the temperature level was set to 75 degrees, which is normal room temperature; the nest month, it was set to 66 degrees, and the following to 75 again and at the last month, it was 81 degrees. Their blood sugar, daily caloric expenditures and insulin levels were tracked.

In the first month, no change was seen, while in the second month, they doubled their volumes of brown fat, their insulin levels improved. They continued burning calories throughout the day as well when their bedroom's were colder. Francesco S Celi, the study's senior author and now a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said, "Just by sleeping in a colder room, they gained metabolic advantages that could, over time, lessen their risk for diabetes and other metabolic problems." In the end, by sleeping in the 81 degree temperature for a month, all the brown fat had lessened.

This discovery, apart from being fascinating, is extremely important as Celi says that with this knowledge, it would make it possible to effortlessly tweak your metabolic health by turning down the bedroom thermostat a few degrees.