Evolutionary Anthropology (METABOLISM) with Herman Pontzer

to disordered eating. We also discuss the body mass index, which is still used by medical professionals but acknowledged by many sociologists to be rooted in structural oppression and racism. And that's something that many scientists and health professionals don't condone. So those are some warnings. Let's get into it. So I've wanted to interview this guy. I know I say this like every episode, but for years. So we're going to dive into it. Metabolisms, how do they work? What's up?

Who am I? What's going on in there?

looking through his list of papers. It gave me actual vertigo, and then I found out where the same age and I don't like to think about it. He's also written several books, including the twenty twenty one release Burn New Research blows the lid off how we really burn calories, lose weight and stay healthy. And yes, we're going to address the science and the culture of all of it, and also just a quick morning We do discuss of course calories, some diet culture in this episode, as well

as weaponized language. We discuss all of that just so you know. But first, just some thank yous to patrons of ologies at Patreon dot com slash Ologies who spend one burning hot dollar a month to join and they can submit questions to Ologists before we record. Also thanks to everyone who's out there wearing ologies merch from Ologiesmarch dot com for no dollars though you can really help

us out and leave a review. And also I read your reviews, and if you do not believe me, thank you for the recent one from RATTERI whose MRI technicians let them listen to ologies while getting an MRI, and so that this podcast is like a weighted blanket where you learn cool facts. Thanks Rattery. Hope all's well, Okay, evolutionary Anthropology. We're going to get to it. How did

humans evolve? Ancient menus, mitochondria trivia, How science can help you talk to your body, perspectives on some sticky medical terms, isotope magic, how much exercise hunter gatherers get, carnivore diets, flim flam scales, the history of the body mass index, and what to do if you're in kind of a bit of a slump according to Science, with author professor, metabolism expert and evolutionary anthropologist, doctor Herman Poncer. I'm i'm

this episode. I'm I don't know. I wish that we had like a full twenty four hour marathon to do this episode because I have so many questions. Okay, we'll start with the easy one. If you could say your first and last name in the pronounce you use.

of what's going on. It does have your height and weight in there, and it's true that the bigger you are, the more cells you're made of, the more calories you burn, So that part is more or less right, But even there, there's so much variation in person a person that it's it's just a real wild gas.

not even a medical doctor. And this was during a time when physicians were just beginning to learn that germs exist and that blood letting doesn't solve all the ailments. So the inventor of the BMI, this astronomer, also influenced early proponents of eugenics. So the color coded BMI charts the doctor's office. Really I don't seem to include that kind of trivia, But as we've mentioned before, so any legit MD can tell you that, of course BMI does not tell the whole story, and it's not fair to

a lot of folks. But nevertheless, as a broad ballpark of cardiovascular or paying creatic risks or joint issues related to body masks. Doctors we've had on the show have said it's a very rough and far from perfect metric.

and weight, you don't. Those numbers can't tell you if you're carrying a lot of muscle versus a lot of fat, for example, And so people who carry a lot of muscle tend to you know, you'll have a higher BMI because your weight will be higher, even though really your body fat might be low if you're an athlete or

something like that. So, yeah, BMI is problematic. It's an imperfect measure, but it's one of the best ones we have, and it does do a pretty good job and aggregate at the population level figuring out who is at higher risk for different diseases. You know, if I know any one thing about you, I'm not going to know enough, right, But if I know, put all those data points together,

then I can start to put a picture together. BMI is just one thing about you, but when I put it in the context of other stuff about you, then I can begin to put a real picture of your health together.

will burn. It again in size, So to put it in real terms, you have the same two people that both weigh let's say one hundred and fifty pounds, but one of them is thirty percent body fat and the other one is only ten percent body fat. They weigh the same amount, but the person's only ten percent body fat. More of them is lean tissue. It's it's organs and muscle, and so that person who's only ten percent body fat will burn more calories than the person who's thirty percent

body fat, just because fat's pretty quiet. It doesn't do a whole lot each day, and so it doesn't burn the many calories.

and stumble upon the saggy tragedy called diaper booty. And it does look how it sounds, But unfortunately, there may be more risk than just your booty, as explained by the twenty seventeen article in the Journal of Esthetic Surgery titled Report on Mortality from Gluteal Fat Grafting, which warns that despite the growing popularity of gluteal fat grafting, significantly higher mortality rates appear to be associated with gluteal fat

grafting than with any other esthetic surgical procedure. So it's risky. What's happening here? Okay, So I looked into this and stray lumps of your fat can break free and then just enjoy a trip through your arteries resulting in a pulmonary embolism. And we're seeing more and more reports of deaths from this procedure as people are traveling to potentially sketchy clinics for beauty tourism. Also for more on harmful beauty standards here all over planet Earth. You can see

the two part colology episode. We'll link do in the show notes. But yeah, in terms of metabolism, if you store any more fat, it's likely to wind up wherever your fat cells were surgically relocated.

basically you're recharging this molecule. So you run on rechargeable batteries when they're charged up, they're called ATP, and you need oxygen to do that conversion to charge up your batteries, and the more mitochondria you have, the more you can do that. So yeah, that's how that's all linked. And your muscles certainly have more mitochondria than your fat cells. Yep, that's right.

if you need a reason for the mitochondria. So this twenty fifteen study in the Journal of Medical Science and Sports Exercise titled Resistance exerc Size Training Alters Mitochondrial Function in Human Skeletal Muscle does contain a spoiler and it reports that the loss of mitochondrial competency is associated with several different chronic illnesses and that endurance exercise it's long

been known to increase mitochondrial function. However, as the title said, they looked into resistance exercise as well like weightlifting and body weight exercise and yoga, and that also appears to be a means to augment the function of muscle mitochondria and if you can get stronger, it could be an act of love to your future self, as detailed by the study Effects of Exercise on Mitochondrial content and Function in Aging Human Skeletal Muscle, which was published by the

Journal of Gerontology, and it notes that exercise enhances mitochondria electron transport chain activity in older human skeletal muscle. What does that mean? You'll feel better longer. So present day you might be groaning bewildered in front of a kettlebell, but future you is like, get in there and get a bitch, do it for us. But let's go in the other direction in time. Let's travel back in time to our harrier shorter ancestors. Where did these Where did

our systems change or evolve? When did we start veering off how much we use our body and what we're eating? Where did things get too far too fast?

It's and then our story where apes, you know, apes are kind of like a twenty million year old story, and our lineage is like seven million years. We're like a seven million year old branch from that with all these little dead ends and crazy things like Lucy and all these other species. And then our particular species, Homo sapiens, well, our group, the genus Homo, is about two and a half million years old, and that's when we think our

kind of modern metabolism starts shaping up. And so that's faster metabolism separates us kind of physiologically from the other apes, so we burn our energy faster. Than other apes do, and we think that that's to help support our big brains. We're more active than other apes are. We have bigger babies more often than other apes do. We live a lot longer, and that takes energy to invest in your body.

So probably your modern metabolism kind of starts shaping up over the last two million years and everything is going great, and then you know, we build ourselves these crazy zoos that we live in today, and everything kind of goes to pieces. That's the short story.

up to be able to support a faster metabolism. And so we see that happening over the past two million years or.

that runs on hot dogs and flat white lattes. And then as we branched off into mammals, which branched off into apes, which branched off into the genus Homo millions of years ago, and then Homo sapiens three hundred thousand years ago, we started growing these bigger brains and babies and needed a faster engine, burning up more fuel to

get us through our journeys of life. And in his book Burn, doctor Poncer describes his working with the Hadza hunter gatherer tribe in northern Tanzania, and I'll read you

an excerpt of his description. He writes, the one thing we knew for certain going into the Hadza Energetics project was that life as a hunter gatherer is tough, like other hunter gatherers, and like all people prior to twelve thousand years ago, the hods that have no domesticated animals or plants, no machines or cars or guns, no modern conveniences to help them get by. Every morning, they wake up with the sun and set out into the wild

savannah for the day's food. Women typically go in groups, relying on their encyclopedic knowledge of the plants around them and the latest info on what's in season to find productive groves of berries or tubers. Several species of wild tubers form the core of the hods of diet, and a woman can spend two or three hours on any given day digging them out of the hard, rocky soil

with a sharpened wooden stick. They can easily cover five miles or more on a foray, often with a child and a sling on their back, and loaded down with twenty pounds of hard won tubers. On the return trip back at camp, women are often busy tending to kids, preparing food, or collecting firewood. Men usually leave camp alone, preferring to hunt by themselves to improve the odds of sneaking up on a zebra, baboon, antelope, or anything else

unlucky enough to cross their path. They aren't picky just about everything except snakes and other reptiles are on the menu. Had Some men make powerful bows with giraffe sinew strings and add a glob of poison to the shaft of their arrows just below the sharp iron tip, poison strong

enough to kill a zebra with a single shot. Men regularly break from hunting to collect wild honey, climbing thirty feet into the crown of massive ancient baobob trees and hacking into the giant hollow limbs to plunder and angry hive. They'll bring the game or honey back to camp, covering ten or fifteen miles round trip, to share with the community. He continues, We've quantified the amount of physical activity that the Hatsa adults get each day, and the results are staggering.

Both men and women average more than two hours of hard work each day, roughly ten times more than the average American. That's in addition to the walking. They get more physical activity in a day than the typical westerner gets in a week. The kids and old folks are active too. Kids are often tasked with fetching water, which can be half a mile from camp, and men and women in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties are out

most days foraging like they did in their prime. This impressive amount of physical activity isn't unique to the Hatsa, he writes. All hunter gatherers lead lives that would make Westerners melt. And while you wouldn't know it from our cushy, urbanized existence today, this extreme level of physical activity was the norm for all humans only a few thousand year years ago. So yes, herman has spent a lot of time across the world pondering your pancreas and butt muscles. So how did he land this gig?

it got this way. I never had any intention of doing any public health stuff, and then we started to get all this really interesting and kind of useful data. One hundred gatherers and activity levels and how that affects metabolism, and all of a sudden, I was like, oh, well, I guess we do have things to share and to contribute in the public health space. And so then it's been a lot of that ever since and it still is today.

food a lot. It's crazy to think about this, but there's no other species where half of the group goes and forges on plant foods and the other half of the group goes and pretends they're carnivores and goes after animal foods, and then at the end of the day they all share it back a camp at the end of the day. That's a really crazy way to make a living.

You combine those together, man, and that's unbeatable. And that's why the last two million years has been all about the genus Homo just taken over and our metabolism kind of responds to that, right, So that's that shared energy economy is the fuel we needed to evolve these faster metabolisms and our bigger brains and all of it. You know what, such humans, apart from other apes, we're really social with these big brains. We share all the time,

we're really cooperative. All of that happens over the last two million years, and it's all tied directly to the foods we're eating, the ways that our bodies are using it, and the hunting and gathering way of life.

they get you know, figured out independently. It's just kind of like the time has come for them. And agriculture is one of those ideas.

and it's wasteful. That's neither here nor there. But rather agriculture took up until six thousand years ago to hit Ireland and the UK, and of course some places continue with hunting and gathering longer, with changes gradually occurring with livestock and plant crops, and then more massive changes as those lands were colonized. How about grains? So did we tend to veer toward grains because of storage reasons and because it was more predictable? Did we kind of shift

our carbohydrate to protein? What happened there when we became agrarian?

But that's not such a new thing. There's this idea out there that hunter gatherers, we're eating all this meat and they hardly had any carbs, and as far as we can tell, that's completely bogus's that's just isn't true.

farming and the food becomes even more dependable. You can start kind of manipulating these animals and plants to provide more energy per bite. And so you know corn, for example, as a classic when you go from this little smaller than your pinky kind of a head of grass and turns into the corn cobs that we know today domesticated animals today on farms carried twice as much fat as wild animals do. Right, So the wild game that we would have hunted has only half the fat that you'd

have on a domesticated animal. And so we start manipulating these these species. And by the way, we're manipulating their metabolisms too. This is you know, if you're me, everything's a metabolism story. And guess what happens. We take all these extra calories and populations explode because we turn those

calories into babies, and so populations grow, villages grow. But at the same time, now we're like living really close together in population gen disease that we never used to, and people start getting sick, and so you see like contagerous disease. You see people actually get shorter because they spend their childhood sick with all those contagious disease, rather than being able to sort of be less exposed to that in a smaller hunter gatherer camp. So I mean, it just changes everything.

own good? I mean, if we think of a calorie, if we think of fuel, we're essentially like sitting on an oil mine most of the world to the point we are today. Are we too wealthy with energy?

available to us. I'm talking and you from my home, I have a literally at arms reach, Like I don't know, I haven't counted up, but like it's I think it's a billion calories more or less. God, it's just the holidays, So you know, I could like eat a week of chocolate if I want to do right.

billion people who experience hunger and food scarcity. So when we talk about a wealth of calories, that is by no means universal, far from it, and conflict in some regions can account for a lot of that, but unemployment and low wages are also huge drivers of food scarcity. So why do some of us have two too much

fuel for our physiological needs? Then our evolution has bargained for well, because just in like the blink of an evolutionary eye, our food sources have changed, and in the last one hundred years, what's become affordable, particularly in food deserts, is lower in nutrients but richer in fuel, like a higher octane than the engine we've evolved for the last two point five million years of our genus. So your ancestors. They did not have prescription antibiotics, they did not have

general anesthesia or X rays. But they also didn't have marshmallow peeps in every color.

other level. Of fossil fuels. We take all that energy and we use that to make our food, right, to plow our fields, or to make fertilizer. Would you care to guess how many calories it takes to make one hundred calories of food?

main one, but heart disease, kidney disease. We saw with the COVID the first way, with the COVID pandemic, that people who were overweight had a much greater risk of serious complications with that, And so I wish I could tell you that, yeah, it's just all stigma and it's all cultural and we should just ignore it, But in good conscience, I don't think I can. I think there's just too many very solid studies out there showing very clearly that carrying a lot of extra weight is not healthy.

And when you carry that weight as fat, I think the fact that it's gotten so stigmatized is super well,

it's terrible on a personal level. There's a personal tragedy, there's a personal cost of that obviously, but it's also counterproductive to the public health intent you know, of some of these measures that end up being seen as stigmatizing, And when people just totally turn off because they're feeling like they're not being heard or they're feeling like it's more oppressive than helpful, then yeah, of course people are going to tune out. So that's how I parse it personally.

talk about fat. This term obese has a dark etymology. It means having eaten oneself fat and the term has been weaponized against fat people for decades. And also side note, many people prefer the term fat, having reclaimed it, so the word obese means different things to different people. There is currently far from a consensus. So I wanted you all to inform me with your lived experience. I wanted

to hear what you had to say. So I asked listeners on X and Blue Sky, calling only for medical professionals or those who self identify as fat, what terminology they prefer when talking about body composition in a scientific and public health sense. And I think it was pretty pretty consistent. I know it was so so Hail Ali, says my optimologist has told me that I'm medically obese

and explained the requirements for being called obese. I'm okay with fat or obese, since there are requirements for being called obese and a club pres says, I like the term fat as a self descriptor. But Lord of Goats says, I don't speak for all fellow fatties, but at six one and three hundred and seventy five pounds, I'd say there's a clear distinction between clinical terms and social slang, and context matters. He says, no clinician should be using

terminology that was immediately lifted from social media. Okay, Sarah Sarah X says isn't overweight the correct term, factual and with less negative connotations than obese fat because you could also be underweight as well. But Confetti Noodles says, disagree with overweight. Fat is a neutral adjective and a neutral descriptor of body types. Additionally, overweight is a word that most fat acceptance folks avoid because it's like, oh, over

what weight exactly? But doctor Suzanne says if someone called me obese or fat, it would take me several days to recover from it. Overweight is as close as I can get without a full on meltdown. Zigzag one fifty six says, as a person who used to be three hundred and fifty pounds and is now two fifty, obese is fine. It's simply a medical term to describe when someone's BMI is over thirty, which is generally linked to

worsening health problems. To your Blue Earth says that I feel obese is mostly used by people who don't have good intentions at heart. They like fat, but sometimes the shocks people when you say it. Also, men use fat against you, they say. Kevin van Day says, I used to be around four hundred pounds, although now I've lost about half of that. But I never once considered obese to be a slur. If anything, I tended to use

obese over fat. Your XM says, I don't ever recall being bullied with the term obese, but fat ass for sure. Someone with the handle fat Man says couldn't care less about the term used overweight, obese, heavy, etc. Doesn't matter to me at all. The tone and the content of how a comment was made is far more important to me reacting negatively, So yeah, it's all over the map.

This was illuminating for me too, how much every answer varied, But my point is, no matter where you fall, open your minds to other sensitivities and also advocate for what feels right to you and feel free to communicate that tone and intent is also important, So for God's sakes, be nice to each other and take your judgments and

throw them in a volcano. Now. Luckily, our lead editor, the Wonderful and the Brilliant Mercedes Maitland, has an undergrad degree in anthropology and a Masters of Science Communication and happened to write her dissertation on exactly the subject, and the title of that distribution was investigating the availability of information on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis in the media and

public health literature. So a lot of metabolic issues that doctor Pons is talking about can be boiled down to the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis. The humans did not evolve for this life, and Mercedes cites several studies explaining that it's important to note that the health recommendations provided by an evolutionary mismatch hypothesis framework already align with standard health advice.

They simply provide a higher level understanding of why those actions lead to better health, and participants in studies who were educated on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis said that novelty led to curiosity and sustained interest, and it made it

easier to link the information to their own experience. She writes, So for all of us, zooming out from how you look or what a dick doctor might be barking at you, and looking at the history of our species can help us understand how our bodies work more because all people should not be held to the same standards of ability,

or of appearance or even metabolism. How much of that is just genetics and how much of that is your body composition, how much muscle you've been able to retain or build things like that.

how your brain is wired. There's also, of course, the way you grew up and how you are exposed to food growing up, and so all of those things shape your brain. Why are your brain in your reward systems to respond to food in a particular way, And they're going to determine if you think about food all the time and kind of can't you know, can't miss the meal without feeling miserable. So your genes matter a whole lot.

But I'll tell you what. We all have the same Our grandparents' generation and their grandparents' generation had the same genes we have.

stop buying their food. Ah, and so you know, and they're not. I don't even really blame them for it. That's like, you know, don't hate the player hit the game. I believe is the expression. Yeah, they're doing what they're built to do, which is to sell food. No, I'm sure they're not trying to make anybody sick.

across organs. A hormone is a signal sent by one organ to another through the bloodstream, and so your indecomsystem is all about the hormones slashing back and forth or your body talking to itself, and those signals, those hormones are meant to regulate things like how hunger you feel, how full you feel, all sorts of not not just hunger in society, but those two. So they're going to be part of the kind of reward system. People are going to complain that I'm kind of mixing up neurotransmitters

and hormones, but I'll let them complain. That's okay. They're part of that reward system that either makes you feel so excited about food that you can't stop or not. But here's what's cool. There are also hormones that you are intestines make called encretance, and those hormones help you feel full and satisfied. And those are the hormones that

the new class of weight loss drugs mimic. This is why these weight loss drugs are working to sort of manipulate how full you feel, and therefore, you know, get control of your your hunger and society. And I you know, I'll be really clear, I don't have any investments or anything like that. I'm not going to make any money else of those drugs. Somebody's gonna make a lot of

money on those drugs. But it's kind of exciting because back in the nineties we started to discover the hormones around hunger and society, how hungry you feel, how full you feel. Carell and you mentioned, which is this hormone that your stomach makes when it's empty, makes you feel hungry. The other one is leptin. People might have heard of. Leptin is a hormone that your fat makes. Your fat makes leptin in response to getting chucked full of fat

and sugar. Well, fat only gets full of fat, but you can pull blood sugar out of your blood and turn it into fat and store it your so when your fat cells are getting filled, your fat goes ah, it makes leptin. That's how I pictured. Anyway, you can't actually hear your fat side, but if you could, and it makes lepton, and your brain hears that lepton, and it should be part of what makes you feel full. And they were gonna give people leptin and it was

gonna make them feel full and they'd stop eating. And it works amazingly if you're a mouse, oh yeah, bummer, it doesn't work so well if you're a humans. It's the same hormone with the same role, but for whatever reason, it didn't have that effect in humans. So they've been hunting around, right because there's a lot of these hormones, and that's what this new class of weight loss drugs is. They were like, oh, well, what about this hormone that your body makes after you eat.

say again, I'm just watching the science come out. I'm not involved in any of it, but just watching these studies come out, it's super impressive to see because it's the first time that we've had a weight loss drug that seems to really have this size of an effect. What we know now is that the effect is pretty sizable. If you stay on the drug, it lasts. If you come off the drug, it bounces back. Now, who's going to bounce back more? Who is going to bounce back less?

Is there something you can do with lifestyle interventions to be able to come off the drug but keep the weight loss. That's the frontier right now. That's where people are at right now.

That sucks, But again it's a bigger picture of total health assessed by a doctor who listens and doesn't like write off other concerns. Is just weight related because actual weight doesn't tell you everything about organ health, or your muscle mass, or even your metabolism. In fact, I'll tell you a little secret, the best thing I've ever done for my body was in my late twenties. I took my scale. I took it to an alley way behind my apartment, and I smashed it with a hammer, and

then I tossed it into a dumpster. Hard a number fluctuating every day and not reflecting muscle or water was doing so much damage psychologically, and so I switched it and I tried to focus on how many steps I was getting each day, because I knew the days that I went on walks, especially if I was outside, I felt less anxious and sad and have more energy. And if you can't take walks, We've done other episodes about how just going outside, being around a tree for a

few minutes can provide a psychological boost. But yeah, for me, scales are garbage, literal garbage. And actually went to the doctor this week and it was a gynecology clinic and they actually had their scale set to kilograms, which as an American, I was like, sweet, I don't know what that is about. I have no idea. I'm not gonna think about it or google it because that's not the point. Well,

when it comes to yo yo dieting, I know. The worst health I was ever in body mass wise, depression wise, like autoimmune stuff wise, was when I was trying to get skinnier and I just when given the opportunity I could eat like half a jar of peanut butter because I was just so pissed to be depriving myself. So I know that yo yo dieting is part of it is probably psychological, but how much, too, is that metabolic? And how do people avoid that if they're just like, fuck this?

And my suggestion is too, if you are pissed off and feeling deprived on whatever food you know, whatever diet you're on or whatever nutrition plan you're kind of trying to stick to, then you're not on one that's going to be sustainable and you got to find one that's better. And you know, that's where I do think there's a place for or intermittent fasting or for low carb diets if you keep them they're done in a healthy way,

or for vegan diets or Mediterranean or whatever. But that's I know, it's hard, and.

by my soul. But Hermann told me that we all have a little bit of magical thinking around this stuff too, and it's really hard in modern culture and with the food available to folks in food deserts, on lower incomes, and really anyone to track how much fuel we're putting into our bodies and how our individual endocrine and are a lot of systems are going to react to them.

And Hermann says that there's such a stigma around body image and health and so much undo blame on individuals that it turns into a mental challenge and a stress to just try to tally numbers and understand this really complex and impossible system that he's been studying for over a decade and if you have access to healthcare, talk to a trusted doctor and maybe get your thyroid or your blood sugars checked if you're feeling a little off. But okay, onward to some of the forty nine pages

of questions we got for Herman. I have so many questions from listeners. Can I lob them some at you?

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that people have used it to unalive themselves. So yeah, no, not worth it. You are wonderful as you are, which is living and breathing, and so has.

it turns out, what and that's one of the big surprises. Yeah, so when you're exercising, you burn more calories. That's true while you're exercising, and if you started your exercise program, then yeah, for those first few weeks, you know, you'll be burning more calories by the end of the day

than you were before you started it. But this really interesting phenomenon happens where your body adjusts and so after a few months you're not burning a whole lot more than you were when you started, and maybe not any more than you were and when you started. And so you know, that's some of the really surprising work that's come out of my lab and some others.

But then in the n nineties, when mass spectrometry analysis became more affordable, scientists were able to do this in called the doubly labeled water method, and they had used this before in smaller animals, but it was more affordable now to use in humans. And this involves people drinking a water sample with special non radioactive isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen and then later analyzing a PA sample, maybe two weeks later, to see how much carbon dioxide they

had produced based on what's left of the isotopes. So water, some PA, some mass spectrometry. So much easier than an air lock chamber, and yes, more affordable. And he writes in burn, So what's the bottom line, how many calories do we spend each day? It depends, of course, but not on the factors you might think.

But despite that, despite that, to our enormous surprise, because we did not expect this going in, they burn the same number of calories every days as Americans do. What's going on, Yeah, because their bodies have adjusted to this really rigorous lifestyle and they're say with energy elsewhere. And your body will do that too if you start exercising a new exercise program, so you know, you might not sort of wipe out the entirety of the exercise bump, but a lot of it.

you'll burn more calories. But for your size, we don't think your expenditureill go up that much.

But here are a couple samples. So the twenty seventeen to meta analysis titled is the Comparison between Exercise and Pharmacologic Treatment of Depression and the Clinical Practice Guideline of the American College of Physicians Evidence based in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology, gave a recap of experiments and it found that three randomized clinical trials compared four months of exercise to just antidepressants, and that all of these studies

reported that exercise and standard antidepressant treatments were equally effective. And then another twenty fifteen study in the British Journal of Psychiatry called Physical Exercise for Late life Major Depression showed that the greatest improvements people had were with high intensity aerobics, followed by low intensity aerobics, followed by just antidepressants. And other studies showed that exercise and medication can be

an effective, too pronged intervention for major depression. So what is the message here, Well, it's not for me because I'm not board certified and shit, so you have to talk to a doctor and under no circumstances go off antidepressants on your own. And I say this as your friend, I say this as your internet father. And this spring, I've mentioned this before, but I went off a fexer to try medication for ADHD instead and for my hormonal issues. And guess who ended up in the er with a panic attack?

more amazing. And if you're feeling like garbage and are feeding yourself garbage like I sometimes do, remind yourself that your body deserves fuel and nutrients, and that companies marketing you things are in it to make money, not to make you happy. But what happens if you do all this and you start to feel healthier. And then that second part. Yeah, so the slow down in people's metabolisms after they diet, that's a bit of a myth.

write the ship right, it's a survival response. Tons of weight right away, really fast your body. You're an evolved organism. We've been evolving for millions and millions of years. We have all these mechanisms in place that say, look, times are tough, we've got to tighten our belts and lower the metabolism until things get better again. And so that's real.

That absolutely is real. And people in the Biggest Loser who kept the weight off for six years, their bodies are still in that mode, and the people who gained all the weight back, well, their metabolism's recovered because their bodies were like, Yep, we did it. Good job, guys.

or spices actually do anything for your metabolism? I myself put cayenne pepper and black pepper in my chai every day, but for flavor. But the idea that you can take like a capsasted pill and be like the kittie season, that is not true.

our metabolisms. But the fact of the matter is it really comes down to your brain. So your metabolism is great, it's your brain that's given you trouble, and it's giving you trouble because you know you're surrounded by all this really delicious food that you can't It's hard to pull yourself away from.

are you carrying? Women tend to carry a bit more fat for a given body size. Men tend to carry a bit less. And so if you know fat is quiet, other tissues aren't. So men tend to burn them fit more calories just because the body composition difference. Once you control for that, men women are the same.

body size, which is kind of incredible. And it's because of all the stuff that our cells are doing all day to grow and be active and develop. And then you peak at about one year old, and then you sort of slowly come down through childhood and teenage years, and in your early twenties you hit your adult level. So whatever you and I are at, Alley and Greg, you two and me and where all of us adults, we're at our metabolism kind of plateau, and we're going

to stay there. You're there from your twenties through your late fifties.

sixty it starts to decline. So that decline is real, and so active seniors, it might be the case that's staying really active as a senior sixty years plus is a way to kind of keep that decline at bay What we'd love to know is, so, Okay, when we see metabolism starting to slow down around sixty, that's your cells becoming less active, right, they're slowly kind of turning down the volume nod there on everything they're doing. That's around the same time that people start to get sick.

Your likelihood of heart disease dementia really starts to kick up around the same time. And so that makes us think those things are related. And so if we can keep our cells more active, do we keep those diseases associated with old age at bay Man? Wouldn't that be cool to know? And wouldn't it be great to be able to use that kind of therapeutically. But that's next step and for.

than just having sweet sweet moves. You can see the twenty twenty one paper titled the Active Grandparent Hypothesis Physical Activity and Evolution of extended human health spans and lifespans, and it summed up several previous studies that showed that about twenty minutes a day of moderate physical activity or twelve minutes a day of vigorous aerobic activity reduces average otherwise sedentary person's relative risk of all cause mortality by

fifty percent. So you do that twenty minutes a day, twelve minutes a day of harder activity, your mortality rates go down by fifty percent, which if you live in the United States, that can help you dodge medical bills that could bankrupt you. So that's a plus. So the active grant parent hypothesis what is that? It's won by evolutionary anthropologists to answer the question doesn't nature just want your babies and then for you to die? Why would humans have evolved to be so active and not dead

after they reproduce? Well. Researchers found that in the Hatsa and other hunter gatherer societies, active grandparents will forge for up to six hours a day, taking that burden off of new mothers who are tending to the squirmy little babies. So the active grandparents out there foraging bring in more calories for the whole community, kind of like when Grandma sneaks to you an ice cream sandwich and you both

promise not to tell your parents. Also, before any of you write me letters I love you, but before anyone writes me a letter. Yes, calories is the same thing colloquially as a killo calorie. Technically a calorie is one one thousand of what we call a calorie. But yes, it's just confusing terminology. I don't make the roles. Denise and Scott want to know, is six meals a day to boost metabolism? Is that debunked? Six small meals?

Emily Staffer, Vanessa Fray, and Ellen Monroe. Does that slow your metabolism because you're not eating for twelve hours it's sixteen hours a day or is that not enough to mess it up?

and dinner and snacks more often than I do. I think that's just true.

people get brains wrong. Born with the brain that you have right now, right, your brain is a work in progress from the beginning, and so the genes that helped build your brain matter, but also the experiences you use to finish off and build those connections, and so probably both of them together. But by the time you're an adult, right, the cake is baked and your response to food is what it is, and you're kind of working with what you've got.

that's not really it. It was something like the meant to help their microbiomes had more fiber, was harder to digest, and they absorbed fewer of those calories and more pass through them. And so there you go. You know, that's something that simple. You can see it in action. That absolutely, the way that your guts work, the efficiency with which you pullies out of your food and in your bloodstream, the kind of foods you're feeding yourself which will have

an effect on that. All of those factors are going to are going to play a role. This is the ultimate multiplayer game metabolism. And so to think that it's just one thing, it probably is never just one thing. But it's okay, it's not wrong to think about all the parts that work together. But they are just parts that work together, and the ones that are sustainable they make you eat fewer calories without feeling miserable.

circumstances like the Arctic. So like, man, why do you have to ruin what we know about human evolution? What took so long for people to figure out? And you got to run it just so that you can like enjoy your diet and be snooty. I don't get yeah again.

we had some great questions about hormone replacement therapy. You know, and I know that menopause itself and aging itself doesn't sell you metabolism, but anu Ya Joshi, Kate de Hadway, interstitial k learnarn Dione need him. Rebecca Rome, jen A, Britney Corrigan, Law, Lisa Rohl, and Kay Shannon, as well as Lisa Panic asked about during paramenopause and menopause having less testosterone does that affect your ability to build muscle mass?

that's and they're illegal because they're incredibly effective. Right. And so if you are on testosterone for whatever reason, Yeah, your cells are more active, you're gonna be probably bringing more calories and certainly your body's going to send in the signals hey let's build some muscle, because that's what it's good at. So when it will it go away? Man? That's actually an interesting question. I don't know.

ramp that up. The hormones that are taken for oral contraception actually mimic the hormonal state of pregnancy, and so or the second half of the ovarian cycle, which is the same as the early parts of pregnancy. You've kind of kicked in some mechanisms sort of early pregnancy mechanisms

there to put on some weight. And then the SSRI thing seems to be back to the reward systems in the brain and that you're manipulating those systems, and one of the outcomes is going to be the way that you respond to the reward of food.

I think. I love to teach, and I love to do research, and I feel like I am one of the luckiest people I know in terms of the career I get to have.

And then the other thing I really do enjoy is talking to science, uh, you know, whether that's teaching, or whether that's writing, or whether that's predations like this. I love to be able to share that because I think that's you know, that's part of the job too, and it's a really fun one.

We're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm Ali Ward with one l on both and we have shorter, kid friendly cuts of our classic episodes and those are called smologies and they're available for free. They're at aliward dot com Smologies and Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Noel Dilworth is our

scheduling producer, Susan Hale is managing director. Kelly R. Dwyer makes our website and can make yours, and our lead editor in this episode produced and contributed a ton of excellent research from her own dissertation Sapiens. Indeed, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around it till the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week is kind of weird, Okay. So I was working on

this right. I was listening to a playlist of like some new indie music and there was this one song called drop Dead by Katie Kirby, and no joke, there's a line about body mass indexes, and I was like, get out of my head music, what are you doing to me right now? It is creepy, but it was fun, So there you go. But yeah, put on a song, maybe, enjoy some fresh air, be good to your flesh machine, and most importantly, be good to each other.

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