Metabolism studies reveal surprising insights into how we burn calories—and how cooperative food production helped Homo sapiens flourish
t was my daughter Clara’s seventh birthday party, a scene at once familiar and bizarre. The celebration was an American take on a classic script: a shared meal of pizza and picnic food, a few close COVID-compliant friends and family, a beaming kid blowing out candles on a heavily iced cake.
For all the talk about metabolism in the exercise and dieting worlds, you would think the science was settled. In reality, we’ve been embarrassingly short on hard data about the calories we burn each day and how we evolved to obtain them. But in recent years my colleagues and I have made important strides in understanding how our bodies use energy. Our findings have overturned much of the received wisdom about the ways human energy requirements change over the course of a lifetime.
Herman Pontzer ; Source: “Daily Energy Expenditure through the Human Life Course,” by Herman Pontzer et al., inIt’s obvious that adults need more calories than infants—bigger people have more cells doing more work, so they burn more energy. We also know that elderly people tend to eat less, although that’s often accompanied by a loss of body weight, particularly muscle mass.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was the stability of our metabolism through middle age. Daily energy expenditures hold remarkably steady from age 20 to 60. No middle age slowdown, no change with menopause. The weight gain so many of us experience in adulthood cannot be blamed on a declining metabolism. As a man in my 40s, I had sort of believed the folk wisdom that metabolism slowed as we aged. My body definitely feels different than it did 10 or 20 years ago.
For the past decade I’ve been working with colleagues to understand the calorie economy in the Hadza community of northern Tanzania. The Hadza are a small population of 1,000 or so, and about half of them maintain a traditional hunting-and-gathering way of life, foraging on the savanna landscape they call home. No population alive today is a perfect model of the past, but groups like the Hadza, who continue these traditions, provide a living example of how these systems work.
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