Exercise Doesn't Burn More Calories and You Should Do It Anyway: Herman Pontzer on PYP 471
Channel: Sick to Fit | Plant Yourself Podcast
Date: 06/07/2021

If you care about your health, your weight, and the future of the human race, you absolutely must get acquainted with the work of Herman Pontzer, PhD. He's just written a book, Burn, that will challenge everything you think you know about what it means to be a living organism.

Pontzer argues - and provides ample evidence for his claims - that the archaic engineering model of "body as machine" fails to account for how we behave in the real world. We are not products of engineering, but evolution.

And our evolutionary heritage is doing a shitty job of helping us cope with our modern environments.

We've evolved, for example, to burn about 3000 kcalories per day, regardless of how physically active we are.

Which means that amping up our exercise will not lead to weight loss. And that eating a lot less than 3000 kcalories per day puts us into starvation mode, in which our metabolism slows and our brains become fixated on finding calories.

We've evolved to share our food with our tribe, an innovation that allowed us to mitigate risk and spend huge amounts of energy on cognition and childrearing.

Which means we also have a strong "be suspicious of anyone not in our tribe" mentality.

In our rollicking conversation, we talk about his work with the hunter/gatherer Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania, his lab work, and the effort of dispelling all the myths and misinformation that abound in the world of diet and nutrition.

We also talk about energy more broadly - as he reminds us in Burn, calories and kilowatt hours and miles per gallon all refer to the same thing.

Our overuse and misuse of energy external to our bodies (from fire to fossil fuels) is leading us to fry our planet and causing a catastrophic obesity and metabolic disorder epidemic. And the two phenomena are related, as we spend 8 calories in energy for every calorie we harvest to consume. Essentially, our entire civilization is a Ponzi scheme, and the bill is now coming due.

We discuss the lessons of the Hadza, why gorillas don't get fat in zoos (except where they're given cake and donuts), and why both plant-based and high-protein diets are useful for weight loss.

To me, the conversation is a lesson in true scientific integrity and humility. Several times, Pontzer answered, "I don't know," and pointed to the need to experiment and test and measure to discover the truth.