Slimming World Body Magic Exercises

[Tammara Freimark]

HermanPontzer is associate professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health at Duke University and has taught at Hunter College and Washington University. One of the world's foremost authorities on metabolism and its development throughout human history, Pontzer received a grant in 2018 from the National Science Foundation for the development and implementation of a global human metabolic physiology database. He received his PhD in biological anthropology from GSAS in 2006.

Evolutionary biologists like me, we like to think about energy in terms of a budget. Right? Not so different than the budgets we're all used to using with money. And so energy comes in and gets used to power all of our various systems, all of our 37 trillion cells hard at work all day. And so, the energy that we bring in has to match the energy that we spend.

And so, yeah, we think about it kind of economically. And in the same way that, if I want to know what the priorities are for a business or the priorities are for a country or a state or any sort of big economy, I can understand the priorities for my body by seeing how that energy gets spent. Is it being spent on immune system, on reproduction, on growth? And so, yeah, an evolutionary biologist often takes that kind of economics perspective on energy, because it tells us a lot about what the evolved priorities are for any organism.

The simple answer, if it's a simple answer, is that, for a half a billion years of evolution in animals, losing weight's been a really bad sign. Right? If you're losing weight, your economics are not sustainable. Right? You're not bringing in enough to cover your expenses, and that pathway leads to death. And so, your body is built to be really good about defending its body weight. It doesn't want to change weight very easily.

And if it's going to make a mistake one direction or the other, it surely doesn't want to lose weight. And so, your body works really hard to never lose weight. And if you do lose it, to sort of get back to where you were before. So, the word "set point" gets thrown around, I think, too much. I think maybe that's too much stock that gets put into that as some sort of a hard-wired set point, but your body does seem to want to keep itself at its current weight.

For folks who don't know, the Hadza are a traditional hunter-gatherer community in northern Tanzania. So, they don't have any machines or vehicles or electricity or anything like that. Instead, they hunt and gather wild foods each day for the food they need to live. And as you can imagine, that's a really physically active lifestyle. So, they are getting about-- it depends on exactly how you want to measure it, but about 5 to 10 times more physical activity every day than the typical American.

And so, as an evolutionary anthropologist, humans, we all evolved as hunter-gatherers. So, populations that are still hunting and gathering are this kind of really valuable window into what that lifestyle does to our bodies and how any of our bodies would work in that kind of an environment. And so, we wanted to go understand how metabolism works with the Hadza. It seemed really important. And we were sure, going into it, that they would have these really elevated metabolic rates, that they would burn lots of calories every day compared to the typical American because they're so physically active, the Hadza.

And so, we went there in 2009 and 2010, my collaborators Dave Raichlen and Brian Wood and I. And we measured total daily energy expenditures, all the calories burned per day, over about a 10-day period with men and women in the Hadza community. And we did it using this technique called "doubly labeled water," which allows us to really precisely measure calories burned. So, people had estimated the calories burned by hunter-gatherers before, but nobody ever measured it before. And so, these are the first real measurements.

And so, we went there and spent a summer collecting all these data and got back and had the data analyzed by one of the leading doubly labeled water labs here in the country. And we were totally shocked. Because even though they are much more physically active than us, the Hadza, they don't burn any more calories than we do.

And in fact, when you account for things like body size, fat percentage, age, no matter how you want to sort of slice it, there's actually no difference at all in daily energy expenditure between Hadza men and women and adults in the US and in Europe and other industrialized populations. So, a total shock. They are 5 to 10 times more physically active, but there is no discernible difference in the total calories burned per day.

Yeah. Absolutely. So, we were totally shocked as well. And one thing we did, first of all, is make sure we weren't wrong. So, we actually went and measured it again using a heart rate technique. We calibrated heart rate, so you get the same answers no matter how you measure it. We've been able to show this in other populations, too. So, it's not just the Hadza. Yeah. So, what's going on, and does it sort of defy the laws of physics? Well, let's get back to that economics analogy with energy. Right?

We tend to focus a lot on the energy that we spend on physical activity, especially on exercise. Right? Because we're really aware of that. Our heart rate goes up, and the calories we're burning per minute or per hour are much higher when we're exercising, of course, because we can feel that. And so, we focus on activity when we think about the expenditure. But actually, even if for someone in the Hadza community, most of the calories burned every day are burned on other stuff. They're burned on immune system and on just the basic processes of homeostasis, keeping your cells alive, reproductive system, nervous system.

All of these systems that we aren't even really aware of are actually where you spend the bulk of your calories. And so, what we think is happening is the Hadza and other really physically active populations, they're spending a bit less on those other processes to sort of make room for the physical activity. So, there's no magic here. The laws of physics remain intact, undefeated. [CHUCKLING] It's just that the way that they're spending their energy is different on other tasks.

Well, I think good news. One thing we've been looking into more recently is sort of trying to bring these results home and see what they mean here in the US. When people are more physically active here in the US, we see the same kind of compensation happening. Maybe not as severe as with the Hadza, but we see people, they start a new exercise program, they're not burning as many calories as you'd expect based on the number of calories that were assigned to them in the exercise program. So, we see the same kind of compensation happening here, too.

And what we know is that exercise is really good for us. And one of the reasons it's so good for us is that it does things like lowers our inflammation levels. It lowers our stress reactivity. It gets reproductive hormones in a sort of more healthy range, not the sort of sky-high testosterone and estrogen levels that you can see in sedentary people. And so, those compensations that we see here in the US and we see parts of that as well when we look at other communities, it hasn't been studied as well elsewhere, we think are part of the health benefits of all that activity.

So, when we look at the Hadza, they don't get heart disease. They don't get Type 2 diabetes. They don't have the kind of levels of reproductive cancers, for example, that we see in the US. These other traditional societies, them and other traditional groups, are really healthy that way. And I think that that energy compensation, that sort of re-juggling of the energy budget, is one of the big reasons that they're so healthy compared to us for those non-communicable diseases.

And we're talking like a year after you start your exercise program. You can be diligent about it every day or every week. And you can expect to have lost, at the end of the year, about five pounds. So, it's not a great tool for weight loss. It is really good for all the other things, as you say. Now, weight gain or weight loss, again, it's about that energy budget. Calories in versus calories out.

And what our data are showing is that the calories out is really hard to budge. Your body doesn't want to change that very much. And so, what that says is that then weight gain, obesity, overweight, these issues that we struggle with in the US, it is about the energy coming in. Right? It's about the energy in part of the equation, so it is about diet.

Yeah, they are. So, whether you get your calories from carbohydrates or from fats or even from proteins, although you get a few of them from proteins in a typical diet, they all will have the same effect on your weight in terms of the calories that you store in your body is weight. Now, that doesn't mean that all foods are created equal. Right? I mean, a cupcake and a bowl of broccoli might have the same number of calories, but they'll have different effects on your health. So, that's not the argument of sort of calories are being equal. But in terms of just pure weight gain and weight maintenance, yes, calories are calories.

No. I think that's really been oversold. So, simple sugars, added sugars in our processed foods that we eat are one way that we end up eating more calories than we planned to or we can trick our brains a bit into over consuming because your brain is pretty good at matching energy intake and expenditure. So, all those extra empty sugar calories are one way that you can push it over the edge. So, in that sense, yeah, carbs aren't great because sugars are carbs.

But added oils are no good either. Right? And they're another way that we can trick our brains and overconsume. And oils are fats. When we look across different populations, like the Hadza, for example, the Hadza eat more carbs than we do. Right? And they don't have any issues with their weight. If carbohydrates were really driving the bus when it came to weight gain, the Hadza should all be overweight. But of course, they're not.

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