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Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's that cardigan that you left in anewber
Speaker 1: Ali ward here with an episode about our squishy, juicy
Speaker 1: machines and how they run. Just to content warning up top.
Speaker 1: So this episode discusses really sensitive themes like diet culture
Speaker 1: and coloric intake, and the psychological and physical effects of
Speaker 1: food restriction. And it includes many listeners personal experience with
Speaker 1: the term obesity as well, and the content may be
Speaker 1: triggering for those with a history of or a sensitivity
Speaker 1: to disordered eating. We also discuss the body mass index,
Speaker 1: which is still used by medical professionals but acknowledged by
Speaker 1: many sociologists to be rooted in structural oppression and racism.
Speaker 1: And that's something that many scientists and health professionals don't condone.
Speaker 1: So those are some warnings. Let's get into it. So
Speaker 1: I've wanted to interview this guy. I know I say
Speaker 1: this like every episode, but for years. So we're going
Speaker 1: to dive into it. Metabolisms, how do they work? What's up?
Speaker 1: Who am I? What's going on in there?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 1: This guy did his undergrad work in anthropology, got a
Speaker 1: PhD from Harvard University in biological anthropology, and has been
Speaker 1: a professor of anthropology for nearly twenty years, during which
Speaker 1: time he's been an Associate Research Professor of Global Health
Speaker 1: at Duke Global Health Institute, and he's now a Professor
Speaker 1: of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University. He knows what's up.
Speaker 1: His CV is twenty three pages long. I was like
Speaker 1: looking through his list of papers. It gave me actual vertigo,
Speaker 1: and then I found out where the same age and
Speaker 1: I don't like to think about it. He's also written
Speaker 1: several books, including the twenty twenty one release Burn New
Speaker 1: Research blows the lid off how we really burn calories,
Speaker 1: lose weight and stay healthy. And yes, we're going to
Speaker 1: address the science and the culture of all of it,
Speaker 1: and also just a quick morning We do discuss of
Speaker 1: course calories, some diet culture in this episode, as well
Speaker 1: as weaponized language. We discuss all of that just so
Speaker 1: you know. But first, just some thank yous to patrons
Speaker 1: of ologies at Patreon dot com slash Ologies who spend
Speaker 1: one burning hot dollar a month to join and they
Speaker 1: can submit questions to Ologists before we record. Also thanks
Speaker 1: to everyone who's out there wearing ologies merch from Ologiesmarch
Speaker 1: dot com for no dollars though you can really help
Speaker 1: us out and leave a review. And also I read
Speaker 1: your reviews, and if you do not believe me, thank
Speaker 1: you for the recent one from RATTERI whose MRI technicians
Speaker 1: let them listen to ologies while getting an MRI, and
Speaker 1: so that this podcast is like a weighted blanket where
Speaker 1: you learn cool facts. Thanks Rattery. Hope all's well, Okay,
Speaker 1: evolutionary Anthropology. We're going to get to it. How did
Speaker 1: humans evolve? Ancient menus, mitochondria trivia, How science can help
Speaker 1: you talk to your body, perspectives on some sticky medical terms,
Speaker 1: isotope magic, how much exercise hunter gatherers get, carnivore diets,
Speaker 1: flim flam scales, the history of the body mass index,
Speaker 1: and what to do if you're in kind of a
Speaker 1: bit of a slump according to Science, with author professor,
Speaker 1: metabolism expert and evolutionary anthropologist, doctor Herman Poncer. I'm i'm
Speaker 1: this episode. I'm I don't know. I wish that we
Speaker 1: had like a full twenty four hour marathon to do
Speaker 1: this episode because I have so many questions. Okay, we'll
Speaker 1: start with the easy one. If you could say your
Speaker 1: first and last name in the pronounce you use.
Speaker 4: Sure, I am Hermann poncer he.
Speaker 1: Him his got it and doctor of.
Speaker 4: Course, sure, I mean between friends whatever.
Speaker 1: What ologists do you call yourself?
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's say, let's call it evolutionary anthropology.
Speaker 1: Okay, first off, you're an expert in metabolism. And first off, metabolism,
Speaker 1: what even is it? Where does it come from?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So you know you are made of thirty seven trillion
Speaker 4: plus or minus cells, and every one of those cells
Speaker 4: has work to do all day. They've got to bring
Speaker 4: nutrients in and break them down and build them back up,
Speaker 4: and all that work takes energy, and all that energy
Speaker 4: together is what we call your metabolism.
Speaker 1: And when you are looking at say your fitbit or
Speaker 1: your or ring or whatever, and it says, based on
Speaker 1: your height and weight, you probably burn seventeen hundred calories
Speaker 1: a day or twelve hundred or whatever. Does it have
Speaker 1: any idea what the fuck it's talking about? Or is
Speaker 1: that so off?
Speaker 4: It's a little bit better than a random number generator.
Speaker 1: It was just a little.
Speaker 4: So it gets this much right. It is most of
Speaker 4: what you burn every day, even if you're an active person,
Speaker 4: Most of the calories you burn every day are just
Speaker 4: it's not about avity it's about all the other stuff
Speaker 4: your body's doing. As we're talking here, Every fifth breath,
Speaker 4: I think, is the oxygen needed to feed your brain.
Speaker 1: Right, So twenty percent of your breathing goes to fueling
Speaker 1: your brain, whether you're filling a whiteboard with physics theorems
Speaker 1: or watching my dog breath because she's old and precious.
Speaker 4: It's true that your brain uses a lot of energy,
Speaker 4: and so we can all feel good about that. Your
Speaker 4: brain runs a five k every day. It's two hundred
Speaker 4: calories a day, so you know, it's most of the
Speaker 4: energy you use is not activity. And so when you
Speaker 4: have a fitbit or something like that and it's trying
Speaker 4: to you know, kind of ballpark or guess your energy
Speaker 4: expenditure based on activity is really missing a large part
Speaker 4: of what's going on. It does have your height and
Speaker 4: weight in there, and it's true that the bigger you are,
Speaker 4: the more cells you're made of, the more calories you burn,
Speaker 4: So that part is more or less right, But even there,
Speaker 4: there's so much variation in person a person that it's
Speaker 4: it's just a real wild gas.
Speaker 1: Okay, I mean, I understand BMI is not really accurate
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, depends on what you're trying to measure, right,
Speaker 4: BMI is great for knowing your BMI.
Speaker 1: So BMI side note stands for body mass index and mathematically,
Speaker 1: it's your body mass in kilograms divided by the square
Speaker 1: of your height in meters, and medicine's optimal BMI land
Speaker 1: somewhere between eighteen point five and twenty four point nine.
Speaker 1: This is a little fun fact. So the body mass
Speaker 1: index was invented in the eighteen thirties by an Austrian
Speaker 1: scientist named lambern Adolphe Jacques Coudelaie, who surprise, was an astronomer,
Speaker 1: not even a medical doctor. And this was during a
Speaker 1: time when physicians were just beginning to learn that germs
Speaker 1: exist and that blood letting doesn't solve all the ailments.
Speaker 1: So the inventor of the BMI, this astronomer, also influenced
Speaker 1: early proponents of eugenics. So the color coded BMI charts
Speaker 1: the doctor's office. Really I don't seem to include that
Speaker 1: kind of trivia, But as we've mentioned before, so any
Speaker 1: legit MD can tell you that, of course BMI does
Speaker 1: not tell the whole story, and it's not fair to
Speaker 1: a lot of folks. But nevertheless, as a broad ballpark
Speaker 1: of cardiovascular or paying creatic risks or joint issues related
Speaker 1: to body masks. Doctors we've had on the show have
Speaker 1: said it's a very rough and far from perfect metric.
Speaker 4: You know, it's if BMI is trying to get at
Speaker 4: your fat percentage, which is what most people you know,
Speaker 4: that's kind of how we use it. We think about
Speaker 4: if you have a high BMI, it means you're carrying
Speaker 4: too much fat. But of course you know you're height
Speaker 4: and weight, you don't. Those numbers can't tell you if
Speaker 4: you're carrying a lot of muscle versus a lot of fat,
Speaker 4: for example, And so people who carry a lot of
Speaker 4: muscle tend to you know, you'll have a higher BMI
Speaker 4: because your weight will be higher, even though really your
Speaker 4: body fat might be low if you're an athlete or
Speaker 4: something like that. So, yeah, BMI is problematic. It's an
Speaker 4: imperfect measure, but it's one of the best ones we have,
Speaker 4: and it does do a pretty good job and aggregate
Speaker 4: at the population level figuring out who is at higher
Speaker 4: risk for different diseases. You know, if I know any
Speaker 4: one thing about you, I'm not going to know enough, right,
Speaker 4: But if I know, put all those data points together,
Speaker 4: then I can start to put a picture together. BMI
Speaker 4: is just one thing about you, but when I put
Speaker 4: it in the context of other stuff about you, then
Speaker 4: I can begin to put a real picture of your
Speaker 4: health together.
Speaker 1: So does metabolism depend a lot on your muscle mass
Speaker 1: or your lean to lipid ratio? I also like, what
Speaker 1: if you have big heavy bones? How does that work?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Well, those are all good questions. So the biggest
Speaker 4: factor is how much what we call fat free mass
Speaker 4: you carry you versus your fat mass, and so all
Speaker 4: your organs and muscle aside from fat, fat's an organ too.
Speaker 4: But aside from your fat, all of those organs you know,
Speaker 4: your liver and brain and kidneys. They all burn a
Speaker 4: lot of energy. So the more of that that you are,
Speaker 4: and the less fat that you are, the more calories
Speaker 4: will burn. It again in size, So to put it
Speaker 4: in real terms, you have the same two people that
Speaker 4: both weigh let's say one hundred and fifty pounds, but
Speaker 4: one of them is thirty percent body fat and the
Speaker 4: other one is only ten percent body fat. They weigh
Speaker 4: the same amount, but the person's only ten percent body fat.
Speaker 4: More of them is lean tissue. It's it's organs and muscle,
Speaker 4: and so that person who's only ten percent body fat
Speaker 4: will burn more calories than the person who's thirty percent
Speaker 4: body fat, just because fat's pretty quiet. It doesn't do
Speaker 4: a whole lot each day, and so it doesn't burn
Speaker 4: the many calories.
Speaker 1: Let's rewind though, Can we go back to the fat
Speaker 1: as an organ? What? Yeah, what's that about?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean fat's not just hanging out. It makes hormones.
Speaker 4: It pulls in nutrients out of your blood as storage,
Speaker 4: and then it sends them back into your blood when
Speaker 4: you need them later for energy. It's doing jobs that
Speaker 4: other tissues don't do. So yeah, you need it.
Speaker 1: Is it true that you don't get more fat cells,
Speaker 1: they just get more capacious or just get more stuffed?
Speaker 1: What's it?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, Usually when you were adding fat, you're not
Speaker 4: growing more fat cells as much as you're just packing
Speaker 4: the fat cells you have with lipids, right, So your
Speaker 4: fat cells have this enormous capacity to just get bigger
Speaker 4: by pulling in fat.
Speaker 1: So what happens when you get a BBL do they
Speaker 1: You have the same number of fat cells, but it's
Speaker 1: just maybe in different places that you find sesthetically more
Speaker 1: desirable when that's a Brazilian buttleft.
Speaker 4: Left. That's now, so isn't that one of the there's
Speaker 4: some of those where they take other people's fat, but
Speaker 4: this is one where you take your own fat. This
Speaker 4: is your They take your own fat.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think they take like your muffin top and they
Speaker 1: put it in your boobs or your butt or your face.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know if there's like a Jack
Speaker 1: Sprat website where you're like, I've got a little too
Speaker 1: much if anyone wants it, I don't have enough. Like
Speaker 1: a Facebook marketplace tab I don't know. So you have,
Speaker 1: you're retaining your fat cells, but they're just in different
Speaker 1: parts of the body.
Speaker 4: You see. Now, this really is a two way street, Alley.
Speaker 4: I'm learning from you things I didn't know that. I
Speaker 4: think that. I love that. It's just like you turn
Speaker 4: it yourself into Plato and you just push things.
Speaker 1: Around my greedom.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, so one thing to think about there
Speaker 4: is when they do that. Yeah, they're taking cells, right,
Speaker 4: They're not taking like just stuff, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: I think people think about fat as being this kind
Speaker 4: of like inert stuff that's not alive. It's alive, man,
Speaker 4: and so they're moving that around. I can imagine that's
Speaker 4: got some interesting consequences for how everything works.
Speaker 1: And yes, okay, so a Brazilian butt lift or BBL.
Speaker 1: It's the redistribution of at apost tissue that's abducted from
Speaker 1: your stomach or your thighs and then it's purified and
Speaker 1: whisked away to a new part of the body. And
Speaker 1: the relocation it might change your life where it might
Speaker 1: be a mistake, your mileage maybury. One Beauty magazine urged
Speaker 1: those considering the procedure to first google BBL done wrong
Speaker 1: and friends. This may lead you to scroll image searches
Speaker 1: and stumble upon the saggy tragedy called diaper booty. And
Speaker 1: it does look how it sounds, But unfortunately, there may
Speaker 1: be more risk than just your booty, as explained by
Speaker 1: the twenty seventeen article in the Journal of Esthetic Surgery
Speaker 1: titled Report on Mortality from Gluteal Fat Grafting, which warns
Speaker 1: that despite the growing popularity of gluteal fat grafting, significantly
Speaker 1: higher mortality rates appear to be associated with gluteal fat
Speaker 1: grafting than with any other esthetic surgical procedure. So it's risky.
Speaker 1: What's happening here? Okay, So I looked into this and
Speaker 1: stray lumps of your fat can break free and then
Speaker 1: just enjoy a trip through your arteries resulting in a
Speaker 1: pulmonary embolism. And we're seeing more and more reports of
Speaker 1: deaths from this procedure as people are traveling to potentially
Speaker 1: sketchy clinics for beauty tourism. Also for more on harmful
Speaker 1: beauty standards here all over planet Earth. You can see
Speaker 1: the two part colology episode. We'll link do in the
Speaker 1: show notes. But yeah, in terms of metabolism, if you
Speaker 1: store any more fat, it's likely to wind up wherever
Speaker 1: your fat cells were surgically relocated.
Speaker 4: They're basically trucking some cells. Sounds like from your muffin
Speaker 4: top as I understand it too.
Speaker 1: Your cut so fat cells are more chill and muscle
Speaker 1: cells are maybe burning more energy. They're a little bit
Speaker 1: more active. Is this a mitochondrial thing? We always hear
Speaker 1: that they're the powerhouse of the cell.
Speaker 4: Oh, very good, yeah, thank you. So mitochondria determine how
Speaker 4: much oxygen you can bring in. You need oxygen to
Speaker 4: be able to make atp ATPs the molecule that your
Speaker 4: cells actually use as energy, and it's actually it's a
Speaker 4: rechargeable battery. So you have ATP, which is I dentozine
Speaker 4: triphosphate and that's converted from a dentozine diphosphate, and so
Speaker 4: basically you're taking this two phosphate molecule at a phosphate
Speaker 4: making a three phosphate molecule. It's all interesting stuff, but
Speaker 4: basically you're recharging this molecule. So you run on rechargeable
Speaker 4: batteries when they're charged up, they're called ATP, and you
Speaker 4: need oxygen to do that conversion to charge up your batteries,
Speaker 4: and the more mitochondria you have, the more you can
Speaker 4: do that. So yeah, that's how that's all linked. And
Speaker 4: your muscles certainly have more mitochondria than your fat cells. Yep,
Speaker 4: that's right.
Speaker 1: So not everyone is able to manipulate their body composition
Speaker 1: for all kinds of reasons, from physical disabilities to mental
Speaker 1: health challenges. There are economic factors. I totally get that,
Speaker 1: But if you're someone who can and wants to get
Speaker 1: slightly more jacked, maybe you want to flex it yourself
Speaker 1: in the mirror. I don't know. Maybe you want to
Speaker 1: have an easier time helping people put their carry ons
Speaker 1: in the overhead bins, but you can also do it
Speaker 1: if you need a reason for the mitochondria. So this
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen study in the Journal of Medical Science and
Speaker 1: Sports Exercise titled Resistance exerc Size Training Alters Mitochondrial Function
Speaker 1: in Human Skeletal Muscle does contain a spoiler and it
Speaker 1: reports that the loss of mitochondrial competency is associated with
Speaker 1: several different chronic illnesses and that endurance exercise it's long
Speaker 1: been known to increase mitochondrial function. However, as the title said,
Speaker 1: they looked into resistance exercise as well like weightlifting and
Speaker 1: body weight exercise and yoga, and that also appears to
Speaker 1: be a means to augment the function of muscle mitochondria
Speaker 1: and if you can get stronger, it could be an
Speaker 1: act of love to your future self, as detailed by
Speaker 1: the study Effects of Exercise on Mitochondrial content and Function
Speaker 1: in Aging Human Skeletal Muscle, which was published by the
Speaker 1: Journal of Gerontology, and it notes that exercise enhances mitochondria
Speaker 1: electron transport chain activity in older human skeletal muscle. What
Speaker 1: does that mean? You'll feel better longer. So present day
Speaker 1: you might be groaning bewildered in front of a kettlebell,
Speaker 1: but future you is like, get in there and get
Speaker 1: a bitch, do it for us. But let's go in
Speaker 1: the other direction in time. Let's travel back in time
Speaker 1: to our harrier shorter ancestors. Where did these Where did
Speaker 1: our systems change or evolve? When did we start veering
Speaker 1: off how much we use our body and what we're eating?
Speaker 1: Where did things get too far too fast?
Speaker 5: Wow?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, how far back do you want to go? Right? Like?
Speaker 4: First of all, mitochondria are these are like a bacteria
Speaker 4: that you caryotic cells basically engulfed and started using as
Speaker 4: a power source. That happened like two billion years ago
Speaker 4: or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's a long time, Is that that's true? How did
Speaker 1: I ever know that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're a chimera. We all are mitochondria, our little
Speaker 4: bacteria relics. Isn't that wild? Yes?
Speaker 1: I didn't realized that we were running on other animal batteries,
Speaker 1: that's wild.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 1: I never knew that. In all of the cell biology
Speaker 1: I took for years and years, I don't think I
Speaker 1: ever grocked that. Oh my gosh. Okay, so we engulfed
Speaker 1: these bacteria.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, well I'm not you, but billions a year ago,
Speaker 4: a couple of billions ago anyway, and so that's when
Speaker 4: the whole kind of story starts. And then man, then
Speaker 4: I'm around two hundred and twenty million years ago. You
Speaker 4: get reptiles that decide to burn their metabolisms faster, and
Speaker 4: you get warm blooded animals that we call mammals today.
Speaker 4: So there's a big step there. Primates get started about
Speaker 4: sixty five million years ago, after the dinosaurs get knocked out.
Speaker 4: It's and then our story where apes, you know, apes
Speaker 4: are kind of like a twenty million year old story,
Speaker 4: and our lineage is like seven million years. We're like
Speaker 4: a seven million year old branch from that with all
Speaker 4: these little dead ends and crazy things like Lucy and
Speaker 4: all these other species. And then our particular species, Homo sapiens, well,
Speaker 4: our group, the genus Homo, is about two and a
Speaker 4: half million years old, and that's when we think our
Speaker 4: kind of modern metabolism starts shaping up. And so that's
Speaker 4: faster metabolism separates us kind of physiologically from the other apes,
Speaker 4: so we burn our energy faster. Than other apes do,
Speaker 4: and we think that that's to help support our big brains.
Speaker 4: We're more active than other apes are. We have bigger
Speaker 4: babies more often than other apes do. We live a
Speaker 4: lot longer, and that takes energy to invest in your body.
Speaker 4: So probably your modern metabolism kind of starts shaping up
Speaker 4: over the last two million years and everything is going great,
Speaker 4: and then you know, we build ourselves these crazy zoos
Speaker 4: that we live in today, and everything kind of goes
Speaker 4: to pieces. That's the short story.
Speaker 1: And when you say that we our metabolisms are speeding up,
Speaker 1: is that because our brains get bigger and they're kind
Speaker 1: of like a V eight versus a V six, like
Speaker 1: just using more fuel.
Speaker 4: No, we get more expensive parts. So it's the V
Speaker 4: eight versus the V six. We have a bigger brain,
Speaker 4: our rective systems are running faster, so we can have
Speaker 4: these bigger babies more often. We are more physically active,
Speaker 4: and so you need to be able to have a
Speaker 4: diet that's got a high enough energy content and be
Speaker 4: able to digest it down and absorb those nutrients. You
Speaker 4: have to turn those nutrients into atp to burn those
Speaker 4: So the whole system kind of has to get ramped
Speaker 4: up to be able to support a faster metabolism. And
Speaker 4: so we see that happening over the past two million
Speaker 4: years or.
Speaker 1: So we think, so one point four billion years ago
Speaker 1: you're far off. Slimy little ancestors engulfed bacteria and they
Speaker 1: made it ours and used it as a rechargeable battery
Speaker 1: that runs on hot dogs and flat white lattes. And
Speaker 1: then as we branched off into mammals, which branched off
Speaker 1: into apes, which branched off into the genus Homo millions
Speaker 1: of years ago, and then Homo sapiens three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, we started growing these bigger brains and babies
Speaker 1: and needed a faster engine, burning up more fuel to
Speaker 1: get us through our journeys of life. And in his
Speaker 1: book Burn, doctor Poncer describes his working with the Hadza
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer tribe in northern Tanzania, and I'll read you
Speaker 1: an excerpt of his description. He writes, the one thing
Speaker 1: we knew for certain going into the Hadza Energetics project
Speaker 1: was that life as a hunter gatherer is tough, like
Speaker 1: other hunter gatherers, and like all people prior to twelve
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, the hods that have no domesticated animals
Speaker 1: or plants, no machines or cars or guns, no modern
Speaker 1: conveniences to help them get by. Every morning, they wake
Speaker 1: up with the sun and set out into the wild
Speaker 1: savannah for the day's food. Women typically go in groups,
Speaker 1: relying on their encyclopedic knowledge of the plants around them
Speaker 1: and the latest info on what's in season to find
Speaker 1: productive groves of berries or tubers. Several species of wild
Speaker 1: tubers form the core of the hods of diet, and
Speaker 1: a woman can spend two or three hours on any
Speaker 1: given day digging them out of the hard, rocky soil
Speaker 1: with a sharpened wooden stick. They can easily cover five
Speaker 1: miles or more on a foray, often with a child
Speaker 1: and a sling on their back, and loaded down with
Speaker 1: twenty pounds of hard won tubers. On the return trip
Speaker 1: back at camp, women are often busy tending to kids,
Speaker 1: preparing food, or collecting firewood. Men usually leave camp alone,
Speaker 1: preferring to hunt by themselves to improve the odds of
Speaker 1: sneaking up on a zebra, baboon, antelope, or anything else
Speaker 1: unlucky enough to cross their path. They aren't picky just
Speaker 1: about everything except snakes and other reptiles are on the menu.
Speaker 1: Had Some men make powerful bows with giraffe sinew strings
Speaker 1: and add a glob of poison to the shaft of
Speaker 1: their arrows just below the sharp iron tip, poison strong
Speaker 1: enough to kill a zebra with a single shot. Men
Speaker 1: regularly break from hunting to collect wild honey, climbing thirty
Speaker 1: feet into the crown of massive ancient baobob trees and
Speaker 1: hacking into the giant hollow limbs to plunder and angry hive.
Speaker 1: They'll bring the game or honey back to camp, covering
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen miles round trip, to share with the community.
Speaker 1: He continues, We've quantified the amount of physical activity that
Speaker 1: the Hatsa adults get each day, and the results are staggering.
Speaker 1: Both men and women average more than two hours of
Speaker 1: hard work each day, roughly ten times more than the
Speaker 1: average American. That's in addition to the walking. They get
Speaker 1: more physical activity in a day than the typical westerner
Speaker 1: gets in a week. The kids and old folks are
Speaker 1: active too. Kids are often tasked with fetching water, which
Speaker 1: can be half a mile from camp, and men and
Speaker 1: women in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties are out
Speaker 1: most days foraging like they did in their prime. This
Speaker 1: impressive amount of physical activity isn't unique to the Hatsa,
Speaker 1: he writes. All hunter gatherers lead lives that would make
Speaker 1: Westerners melt. And while you wouldn't know it from our cushy,
Speaker 1: urbanized existence today, this extreme level of physical activity was
Speaker 1: the norm for all humans only a few thousand year
Speaker 1: years ago. So yes, herman has spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time across the world pondering your pancreas and butt muscles.
Speaker 1: So how did he land this gig?
Speaker 4: Well? I got into this because I wanted to understand
Speaker 4: how people evolve. And there's nothing you can understand. If
Speaker 4: you had to pick one thing to know about an organism,
Speaker 4: you'd pick us metabolism. In my opinion, it tells you
Speaker 4: the most in the smallest amount of time about what
Speaker 4: an organism is all about. And so I just want
Speaker 4: to know how humans, how the hebuid body works. Now
Speaker 4: it got this way. I never had any intention of
Speaker 4: doing any public health stuff, and then we started to
Speaker 4: get all this really interesting and kind of useful data.
Speaker 4: One hundred gatherers and activity levels and how that affects metabolism,
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden, I was like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: I guess we do have things to share and to
Speaker 4: contribute in the public health space. And so then it's
Speaker 4: been a lot of that ever since and it still
Speaker 4: is today.
Speaker 1: At what point did we go from maybe small packs
Speaker 1: of us to bigger villages and start hunting and gathering
Speaker 1: versus agriculture. How did our metabolism and our needs and
Speaker 1: our fuel change.
Speaker 4: Yeah? So, okay, So hunting and gathering is if you
Speaker 4: think about the genus Homo, it is a hunting and
Speaker 4: gathering genus. So that's two and a half millionaires. That's
Speaker 4: before Homo sapiens shows up. We're like the latest hunter
Speaker 4: gatherer model, but we're from a family of hunter gatherers.
Speaker 4: All the genus Homo is all hunting and gathering, and
Speaker 4: that changes things because all of a sudden, you're sharing
Speaker 4: food a lot. It's crazy to think about this, but
Speaker 4: there's no other species where half of the group goes
Speaker 4: and forges on plant foods and the other half of
Speaker 4: the group goes and pretends they're carnivores and goes after
Speaker 4: animal foods, and then at the end of the day
Speaker 4: they all share it back a camp at the end
Speaker 4: of the day. That's a really crazy way to make
Speaker 4: a living.
Speaker 6: Want my pickle.
Speaker 4: But what it does is you can always depend on
Speaker 4: the plant foods, so you have this dependable safety net
Speaker 4: food or staple. And then the animal foods a game
Speaker 4: that you go after, have tons of of fat and
Speaker 4: protein and they're really nutritious. You know, you won the
Speaker 4: lottery kind of packages. You get a zebra or a draft.
Speaker 4: You combine those together, man, and that's unbeatable. And that's
Speaker 4: why the last two million years has been all about
Speaker 4: the genus Homo just taken over and our metabolism kind
Speaker 4: of responds to that, right, So that's that shared energy
Speaker 4: economy is the fuel we needed to evolve these faster
Speaker 4: metabolisms and our bigger brains and all of it. You
Speaker 4: know what, such humans, apart from other apes, we're really
Speaker 4: social with these big brains. We share all the time,
Speaker 4: we're really cooperative. All of that happens over the last
Speaker 4: two million years, and it's all tied directly to the
Speaker 4: foods we're eating, the ways that our bodies are using it,
Speaker 4: and the hunting and gathering way of life.
Speaker 1: And then agriculture ten thousand years ago.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a good bell park. Yeah, ten or twelve
Speaker 4: thousand years This is really crazy. Agriculture people figured it
Speaker 4: out all around the same time, independently all over the world.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so like people in the America's figured it out. Uh,
Speaker 4: you know the ASTech in Maya that's famously and in
Speaker 4: the Fertile Crescent the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that you've
Speaker 4: probably heard of it if you were my generation learned
Speaker 4: about in social studies in Ear East and then of
Speaker 4: course in the East Asia that they figured that out
Speaker 4: there too, and probably other places in Africa. And so yeah,
Speaker 4: it's one of these like kind of good ideas. Isn't
Speaker 4: that amazing that sometimes you have these great ideas and
Speaker 4: they get you know, figured out independently. It's just kind
Speaker 4: of like the time has come for them. And agriculture
Speaker 4: is one of those ideas.
Speaker 1: What a trend watch the hottest thing right now? Agriculture?
Speaker 4: That's right? Are you still going out there to get
Speaker 4: your food?
Speaker 1: And for more about where fire plays into our history
Speaker 1: and its role in our brain size hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of years ago. Yeah, we have a whole episode dedicated
Speaker 1: to that. It's called pyrotechnology, so we'll link that in
Speaker 1: the show notes. But going forward to the switch to
Speaker 1: golden fields of wheat and rye, it didn't happen as
Speaker 1: fast as like a TikTok home interior trend, which I'm
Speaker 1: sorry goes too fast for anyone to keep up with,
Speaker 1: and it's wasteful. That's neither here nor there. But rather
Speaker 1: agriculture took up until six thousand years ago to hit
Speaker 1: Ireland and the UK, and of course some places continue
Speaker 1: with hunting and gathering longer, with changes gradually occurring with
Speaker 1: livestock and plant crops, and then more massive changes as
Speaker 1: those lands were colonized. How about grains? So did we
Speaker 1: tend to veer toward grains because of storage reasons and
Speaker 1: because it was more predictable? Did we kind of shift
Speaker 1: our carbohydrate to protein? What happened there when we became agrarian?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so a bunch of things happen. The foods narrow
Speaker 4: first of all, because now you're dependent on a few
Speaker 4: crops that you know, you really spend a lot of
Speaker 4: your time and energy getting, and so that the diet
Speaker 4: kind of narrows. You're certainly eating a lot of carbs
Speaker 4: in pretty much every early farming culture that we know of.
Speaker 4: But that's not such a new thing. There's this idea
Speaker 4: out there that hunter gatherers, we're eating all this meat
Speaker 4: and they hardly had any carbs, and as far as
Speaker 4: we can tell, that's completely bogus's that's just isn't true.
Speaker 3: Totally bump one.
Speaker 4: Hunter gathered diets in the past were really really diverse.
Speaker 4: Depending on where you lived in the world, different foods
Speaker 4: might be available to you. And so yeah, if you
Speaker 4: live in the Arctic where nothing grows, then surprise, surprise, yeah,
Speaker 4: you're gonna eat a lot of meat and fish. But
Speaker 4: elsewhere in the world people eat a variety of diets
Speaker 4: and a lot of it's pretty carb heavy, so that
Speaker 4: the carb content probably wasn't the new feature. It was
Speaker 4: more about a couple things. First of all, you start
Speaker 4: farming and the food becomes even more dependable. You can
Speaker 4: start kind of manipulating these animals and plants to provide
Speaker 4: more energy per bite. And so you know corn, for example,
Speaker 4: as a classic when you go from this little smaller
Speaker 4: than your pinky kind of a head of grass and
Speaker 4: turns into the corn cobs that we know today domesticated
Speaker 4: animals today on farms carried twice as much fat as
Speaker 4: wild animals do. Right, So the wild game that we
Speaker 4: would have hunted has only half the fat that you'd
Speaker 4: have on a domesticated animal. And so we start manipulating
Speaker 4: these these species. And by the way, we're manipulating their
Speaker 4: metabolisms too. This is you know, if you're me, everything's
Speaker 4: a metabolism story. And guess what happens. We take all
Speaker 4: these extra calories and populations explode because we turn those
Speaker 4: calories into babies, and so populations grow, villages grow. But
Speaker 4: at the same time, now we're like living really close
Speaker 4: together in population gen disease that we never used to,
Speaker 4: and people start getting sick, and so you see like
Speaker 4: contagerous disease. You see people actually get shorter because they
Speaker 4: spend their childhood sick with all those contagious disease, rather
Speaker 4: than being able to sort of be less exposed to
Speaker 4: that in a smaller hunter gatherer camp. So I mean,
Speaker 4: it just changes everything.
Speaker 1: What's with all these babies? Okay, Well, our changing diet
Speaker 1: enabled our species to make more babies, of course, but
Speaker 1: also feed those babies earlier with grainy mush and earlier
Speaker 1: mush feeding meant shorter periods of breastfeeding, which means that
Speaker 1: a person is fertile again sooner, and that means more babies.
Speaker 1: So as a species, grain meant success until then it didn't.
Speaker 1: When did we get kind of too rich for our
Speaker 1: own good? I mean, if we think of a calorie,
Speaker 1: if we think of fuel, we're essentially like sitting on
Speaker 1: an oil mine most of the world to the point
Speaker 1: we are today. Are we too wealthy with energy?
Speaker 4: Oh? Yeah, I mean there's a few ways to think
Speaker 4: about that. First of all, obviously, we had this global
Speaker 4: obesity crisis, and that's telling us right there. I mean,
Speaker 4: you don't have to go any further than that to
Speaker 4: know that we are eating more calories than we're bringing off.
Speaker 4: That's almost entirely driven by changes in our diet and
Speaker 4: the fact that we have just so many more calories
Speaker 4: available to us. I'm talking and you from my home,
Speaker 4: I have a literally at arms reach, Like I don't know,
Speaker 4: I haven't counted up, but like it's I think it's
Speaker 4: a billion calories more or less. God, it's just the holidays,
Speaker 4: So you know, I could like eat a week of
Speaker 4: chocolate if I want to do right.
Speaker 1: Now, okay, before anyone gets worried, we'll discuss the term
Speaker 1: obesity at length in a minute. But in terms of
Speaker 1: caloric resources, so, poverty and food scarcity abound in so
Speaker 1: many countries, including whichever one you're in right now, and
Speaker 1: in the US, reports estimate that more than forty four
Speaker 1: million people face hunger, and that includes one in five children. Globally,
Speaker 1: estimates range from seven hundred million to two point four
Speaker 1: billion people who experience hunger and food scarcity. So when
Speaker 1: we talk about a wealth of calories, that is by
Speaker 1: no means universal, far from it, and conflict in some
Speaker 1: regions can account for a lot of that, but unemployment
Speaker 1: and low wages are also huge drivers of food scarcity.
Speaker 1: So why do some of us have two too much
Speaker 1: fuel for our physiological needs? Then our evolution has bargained
Speaker 1: for well, because just in like the blink of an
Speaker 1: evolutionary eye, our food sources have changed, and in the
Speaker 1: last one hundred years, what's become affordable, particularly in food deserts,
Speaker 1: is lower in nutrients but richer in fuel, like a
Speaker 1: higher octane than the engine we've evolved for the last
Speaker 1: two point five million years of our genus. So your ancestors.
Speaker 1: They did not have prescription antibiotics, they did not have
Speaker 1: general anesthesia or X rays. But they also didn't have
Speaker 1: marshmallow peeps in every color.
Speaker 4: That's crazy, right, that's never happened. That isn't how life's
Speaker 4: supposed to work. And not only that, but the way
Speaker 4: we make the calories is really peculiar. So would you
Speaker 4: care to guess how many calories you know of fossil fuels? Basically,
Speaker 4: because this is what we did. We take all of
Speaker 4: this energy from the outside world, and right now we're
Speaker 4: hooked on fossil fuels to do this. Used to just
Speaker 4: be fire and stuff, but now it's at a whole
Speaker 4: other level. Of fossil fuels. We take all that energy
Speaker 4: and we use that to make our food, right, to
Speaker 4: plow our fields, or to make fertilizer. Would you care
Speaker 4: to guess how many calories it takes to make one
Speaker 4: hundred calories of food?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 1: God, one hundred calories of food. I was going to
Speaker 1: guess five hundred, but then I opted because I figured
Speaker 1: that was too conservative. So I don't know what I'm
Speaker 1: doing here. A thousand, Yeah.
Speaker 4: That's about right, am I Right? Yeah, it's like a
Speaker 4: ten times more, just about eight times the energy it
Speaker 4: takes to make the calories on your plate. And that's
Speaker 4: can you just that's insane, right, No other species can
Speaker 4: survive if it burns more energy then it gets.
Speaker 1: So we should all just drink gasoline.
Speaker 4: Probably you heard it here first. People.
Speaker 1: It's not intended to diagnose or treat any illness. What
Speaker 1: about in terms of this epidemic of I'm going to
Speaker 1: air quotes obesity. I know that a lot of us
Speaker 1: might have a hard time with those words or those labels,
Speaker 1: or if you go into your physician, they might say
Speaker 1: very clinically like you're at this, you're at that, you're
Speaker 1: at this. But also socially, so many people have been
Speaker 1: objects of oppression. So how do we parse out what's
Speaker 1: healthy versus what's just body shaming?
Speaker 4: That is a great question, And you're absolutely right that
Speaker 4: there's way too much stigma and moralizing around this. I
Speaker 4: wish it were otherwise, but it is still the fact
Speaker 4: that people who are carrying more than is healthy in
Speaker 4: terms of body fat are at a greater risk for
Speaker 4: a whole lot of different diseases. Diabetes is probably the
Speaker 4: main one, but heart disease, kidney disease. We saw with
Speaker 4: the COVID the first way, with the COVID pandemic, that
Speaker 4: people who were overweight had a much greater risk of
Speaker 4: serious complications with that, And so I wish I could
Speaker 4: tell you that, yeah, it's just all stigma and it's
Speaker 4: all cultural and we should just ignore it, But in
Speaker 4: good conscience, I don't think I can. I think there's
Speaker 4: just too many very solid studies out there showing very
Speaker 4: clearly that carrying a lot of extra weight is not healthy.
Speaker 4: And when you carry that weight as fat, I think
Speaker 4: the fact that it's gotten so stigmatized is super well,
Speaker 4: it's terrible on a personal level. There's a personal tragedy,
Speaker 4: there's a personal cost of that obviously, but it's also
Speaker 4: counterproductive to the public health intent you know, of some
Speaker 4: of these measures that end up being seen as stigmatizing,
Speaker 4: And when people just totally turn off because they're feeling
Speaker 4: like they're not being heard or they're feeling like it's
Speaker 4: more oppressive than helpful, then yeah, of course people are
Speaker 4: going to tune out. So that's how I parse it personally.
Speaker 1: I just I was not sure how to approach this
Speaker 1: episode because I want to be inclusive. I want to
Speaker 1: be sensitive, so I don't want to toss terms that
Speaker 1: you that feel painful or that are insulting. And also,
Speaker 1: the current scientific language for a range in body fat composition,
Speaker 1: or rather the less accurate BMI is as follows, underweight,
Speaker 1: healthy weight, overweight, and obese. And as Aubrey Gordon, who's
Speaker 1: the host of the podcast Maintenance Phase, she points out
Speaker 1: in her book what we don't talk about when we
Speaker 1: talk about fat. This term obese has a dark etymology.
Speaker 1: It means having eaten oneself fat and the term has
Speaker 1: been weaponized against fat people for decades. And also side note,
Speaker 1: many people prefer the term fat, having reclaimed it, so
Speaker 1: the word obese means different things to different people. There
Speaker 1: is currently far from a consensus. So I wanted you
Speaker 1: all to inform me with your lived experience. I wanted
Speaker 1: to hear what you had to say. So I asked
Speaker 1: listeners on X and Blue Sky, calling only for medical
Speaker 1: professionals or those who self identify as fat, what terminology
Speaker 1: they prefer when talking about body composition in a scientific
Speaker 1: and public health sense. And I think it was pretty
Speaker 1: pretty consistent. I know it was so so Hail Ali,
Speaker 1: says my optimologist has told me that I'm medically obese
Speaker 1: and explained the requirements for being called obese. I'm okay
Speaker 1: with fat or obese, since there are requirements for being
Speaker 1: called obese and a club pres says, I like the
Speaker 1: term fat as a self descriptor. But Lord of Goats says,
Speaker 1: I don't speak for all fellow fatties, but at six
Speaker 1: one and three hundred and seventy five pounds, I'd say
Speaker 1: there's a clear distinction between clinical terms and social slang,
Speaker 1: and context matters. He says, no clinician should be using
Speaker 1: terminology that was immediately lifted from social media. Okay, Sarah
Speaker 1: Sarah X says isn't overweight the correct term, factual and
Speaker 1: with less negative connotations than obese fat because you could
Speaker 1: also be underweight as well. But Confetti Noodles says, disagree
Speaker 1: with overweight. Fat is a neutral adjective and a neutral
Speaker 1: descriptor of body types. Additionally, overweight is a word that
Speaker 1: most fat acceptance folks avoid because it's like, oh, over
Speaker 1: what weight exactly? But doctor Suzanne says if someone called
Speaker 1: me obese or fat, it would take me several days
Speaker 1: to recover from it. Overweight is as close as I
Speaker 1: can get without a full on meltdown. Zigzag one fifty
Speaker 1: six says, as a person who used to be three
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty pounds and is now two fifty, obese
Speaker 1: is fine. It's simply a medical term to describe when
Speaker 1: someone's BMI is over thirty, which is generally linked to
Speaker 1: worsening health problems. To your Blue Earth says that I
Speaker 1: feel obese is mostly used by people who don't have
Speaker 1: good intentions at heart. They like fat, but sometimes the
Speaker 1: shocks people when you say it. Also, men use fat
Speaker 1: against you, they say. Kevin van Day says, I used
Speaker 1: to be around four hundred pounds, although now I've lost
Speaker 1: about half of that. But I never once considered obese
Speaker 1: to be a slur. If anything, I tended to use
Speaker 1: obese over fat. Your XM says, I don't ever recall
Speaker 1: being bullied with the term obese, but fat ass for sure.
Speaker 1: Someone with the handle fat Man says couldn't care less
Speaker 1: about the term used overweight, obese, heavy, etc. Doesn't matter
Speaker 1: to me at all. The tone and the content of
Speaker 1: how a comment was made is far more important to
Speaker 1: me reacting negatively, So yeah, it's all over the map.
Speaker 1: This was illuminating for me too, how much every answer varied,
Speaker 1: But my point is, no matter where you fall, open
Speaker 1: your minds to other sensitivities and also advocate for what
Speaker 1: feels right to you and feel free to communicate that
Speaker 1: tone and intent is also important, So for God's sakes,
Speaker 1: be nice to each other and take your judgments and
Speaker 1: throw them in a volcano. Now. Luckily, our lead editor,
Speaker 1: the Wonderful and the Brilliant Mercedes Maitland, has an undergrad
Speaker 1: degree in anthropology and a Masters of Science Communication and
Speaker 1: happened to write her dissertation on exactly the subject, and
Speaker 1: the title of that distribution was investigating the availability of
Speaker 1: information on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis in the media and
Speaker 1: public health literature. So a lot of metabolic issues that
Speaker 1: doctor Pons is talking about can be boiled down to
Speaker 1: the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis. The humans did not evolve for
Speaker 1: this life, and Mercedes cites several studies explaining that it's
Speaker 1: important to note that the health recommendations provided by an
Speaker 1: evolutionary mismatch hypothesis framework already align with standard health advice.
Speaker 1: They simply provide a higher level understanding of why those
Speaker 1: actions lead to better health, and participants in studies who
Speaker 1: were educated on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis said that novelty
Speaker 1: led to curiosity and sustained interest, and it made it
Speaker 1: easier to link the information to their own experience. She writes,
Speaker 1: So for all of us, zooming out from how you
Speaker 1: look or what a dick doctor might be barking at you,
Speaker 1: and looking at the history of our species can help
Speaker 1: us understand how our bodies work more because all people
Speaker 1: should not be held to the same standards of ability,
Speaker 1: or of appearance or even metabolism. How much of that
Speaker 1: is just genetics and how much of that is your
Speaker 1: body composition, how much muscle you've been able to retain
Speaker 1: or build things like that.
Speaker 4: Well, okay, so that's a complicated story too. So it's
Speaker 4: a lot your genetics has a lot to do with
Speaker 4: whether or not you will struggle with your weight. And
Speaker 4: that's because, as far as we can tell, your likelihood
Speaker 4: of putting on too much fat has to do with
Speaker 4: the way that your brain responds to food. Right, And
Speaker 4: there's a lot of different genes and a lot of
Speaker 4: different gene variants that are going to be involved in
Speaker 4: how your brain is wired. There's also, of course, the
Speaker 4: way you grew up and how you are exposed to
Speaker 4: food growing up, and so all of those things shape
Speaker 4: your brain. Why are your brain in your reward systems
Speaker 4: to respond to food in a particular way, And they're
Speaker 4: going to determine if you think about food all the
Speaker 4: time and kind of can't you know, can't miss the
Speaker 4: meal without feeling miserable. So your genes matter a whole lot.
Speaker 4: But I'll tell you what. We all have the same
Speaker 4: Our grandparents' generation and their grandparents' generation had the same
Speaker 4: genes we have.
Speaker 1: But though we have the same genes roughly as our grandparents,
Speaker 1: we have a different number of seven elevens and corporations
Speaker 1: that take your money and build you sugar bombs so
Speaker 1: that your health insurance company can then make a profit
Speaker 1: off of your suffering. And Hermann says, that's where it's complicated,
Speaker 1: because the genes only matter in a bad environment. Did
Speaker 1: the seventies corn syrup explosion have a lot to do
Speaker 1: with health rates and life expectancy at all?
Speaker 4: I just want to first of all, say that the
Speaker 4: seventies corn syrup explosion, if it's not a band name.
Speaker 4: Yet it needs it needs to be immediately.
Speaker 1: It's definitely a jam band with too many carbohydrates and
Speaker 1: simple sugar. Yeah, yeah, it's a raspberry jam band.
Speaker 4: I love it so yeah. People always want to find
Speaker 4: the super villain, right, it's not. It's not carbs, it's
Speaker 4: not sugars, it's not I mean, none of those things
Speaker 4: are good for you, to be real clear, Like extra
Speaker 4: sugar doesn't helping anybody. But it's the kind of the
Speaker 4: combination of it all. It's the fact that you know,
Speaker 4: all that corn syrup goes in to these alt processed
Speaker 4: foods that are literally engineered to be over eaten. Right.
Speaker 4: That's how food companies make money is if you can't
Speaker 4: stop buying their food. Ah, and so you know, and
Speaker 4: they're not. I don't even really blame them for it.
Speaker 4: That's like, you know, don't hate the player hit the game.
Speaker 4: I believe is the expression. Yeah, they're doing what they're
Speaker 4: built to do, which is to sell food. No, I'm
Speaker 4: sure they're not trying to make anybody sick.
Speaker 1: You sure about that? Are you sure about that?
Speaker 4: I don't want to believe that anyway they are though,
Speaker 4: because those foods are you know, as close to addictive
Speaker 4: as they can make them legally.
Speaker 1: I think where does your endocrine system come in in
Speaker 1: terms of what is it grellin and insulin, and also
Speaker 1: just as you age, your estrogen or testosterone changing, or
Speaker 1: your cortisol. They you always see those those ads on
Speaker 1: the internet that's like too much cortisol, You've got belly fat,
Speaker 1: and you're like, who does it have cortisol? There's a
Speaker 1: good pandemic. Yeah, where is where is your endercurrent system?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So okay, So that's a great example of again
Speaker 4: the sort of an other layer of complexity, but we
Speaker 4: can also use this to understand what's happening. So okay,
Speaker 4: So your endocrine system, that's your hormones signaling across tissues,
Speaker 4: across organs. A hormone is a signal sent by one
Speaker 4: organ to another through the bloodstream, and so your indecomsystem
Speaker 4: is all about the hormones slashing back and forth or
Speaker 4: your body talking to itself, and those signals, those hormones
Speaker 4: are meant to regulate things like how hunger you feel,
Speaker 4: how full you feel, all sorts of not not just
Speaker 4: hunger in society, but those two. So they're going to
Speaker 4: be part of the kind of reward system. People are
Speaker 4: going to complain that I'm kind of mixing up neurotransmitters
Speaker 4: and hormones, but I'll let them complain. That's okay. They're
Speaker 4: part of that reward system that either makes you feel
Speaker 4: so excited about food that you can't stop or not.
Speaker 4: But here's what's cool. There are also hormones that you
Speaker 4: are intestines make called encretance, and those hormones help you
Speaker 4: feel full and satisfied. And those are the hormones that
Speaker 4: the new class of weight loss drugs mimic. This is
Speaker 4: why these weight loss drugs are working to sort of
Speaker 4: manipulate how full you feel, and therefore, you know, get
Speaker 4: control of your your hunger and society. And I you know,
Speaker 4: I'll be really clear, I don't have any investments or
Speaker 4: anything like that. I'm not going to make any money
Speaker 4: else of those drugs. Somebody's gonna make a lot of
Speaker 4: money on those drugs. But it's kind of exciting because
Speaker 4: back in the nineties we started to discover the hormones
Speaker 4: around hunger and society, how hungry you feel, how full
Speaker 4: you feel. Carell and you mentioned, which is this hormone
Speaker 4: that your stomach makes when it's empty, makes you feel hungry.
Speaker 4: The other one is leptin. People might have heard of.
Speaker 4: Leptin is a hormone that your fat makes. Your fat
Speaker 4: makes leptin in response to getting chucked full of fat
Speaker 4: and sugar. Well, fat only gets full of fat, but
Speaker 4: you can pull blood sugar out of your blood and
Speaker 4: turn it into fat and store it your so when
Speaker 4: your fat cells are getting filled, your fat goes ah,
Speaker 4: it makes leptin. That's how I pictured. Anyway, you can't
Speaker 4: actually hear your fat side, but if you could, and
Speaker 4: it makes lepton, and your brain hears that lepton, and
Speaker 4: it should be part of what makes you feel full.
Speaker 4: And they were gonna give people leptin and it was
Speaker 4: gonna make them feel full and they'd stop eating. And
Speaker 4: it works amazingly if you're a mouse, oh yeah, bummer,
Speaker 4: it doesn't work so well if you're a humans. It's
Speaker 4: the same hormone with the same role, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 4: it didn't have that effect in humans. So they've been
Speaker 4: hunting around, right because there's a lot of these hormones,
Speaker 4: and that's what this new class of weight loss drugs is.
Speaker 4: They were like, oh, well, what about this hormone that
Speaker 4: your body makes after you eat.
Speaker 1: Does that last or does it have like a rebound effect?
Speaker 1: And also I understand that for people who are diabetic
Speaker 1: it's like a medical necessity in some case, but it's
Speaker 1: also really difficult to get because it's such an effective
Speaker 1: way to change your body mass.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's all kinds of interesting societal questions about arout
Speaker 4: access with that. Is there a rebound? Yeah, it looks
Speaker 4: like if you are on it, you will lose as
Speaker 4: much weight as people lose like in bariatric surgery, which
Speaker 4: is kind of incredible. If you go off of it,
Speaker 4: you'll gain the weight back at least a lot of it.
Speaker 4: I don't know about all of it, and I'll just
Speaker 4: say again, I'm just watching the science come out. I'm
Speaker 4: not involved in any of it, but just watching these
Speaker 4: studies come out, it's super impressive to see because it's
Speaker 4: the first time that we've had a weight loss drug
Speaker 4: that seems to really have this size of an effect.
Speaker 4: What we know now is that the effect is pretty sizable.
Speaker 4: If you stay on the drug, it lasts. If you
Speaker 4: come off the drug, it bounces back. Now, who's going
Speaker 4: to bounce back more? Who is going to bounce back less?
Speaker 4: Is there something you can do with lifestyle interventions to
Speaker 4: be able to come off the drug but keep the
Speaker 4: weight loss. That's the frontier right now. That's where people
Speaker 4: are at right now.
Speaker 1: And Herman notes that these drugs, like someagletide, started off
Speaker 1: as diabetes medications that regulate insulin secretion, and if body
Speaker 1: composition is a factor in any cardiovascular health or diabetic conditions,
Speaker 1: these drugs can also help with that and lower high
Speaker 1: blood pressure or cardiometabolic diseases. Although my friends who are
Speaker 1: diabetic are not down with the general populace or a
Speaker 1: lot of celebrities taking this and gobbling it up while
Speaker 1: folks who have diabetes cannot get a hold of it.
Speaker 1: That sucks, But again it's a bigger picture of total
Speaker 1: health assessed by a doctor who listens and doesn't like
Speaker 1: write off other concerns. Is just weight related because actual
Speaker 1: weight doesn't tell you everything about organ health, or your
Speaker 1: muscle mass, or even your metabolism. In fact, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you a little secret, the best thing I've ever done
Speaker 1: for my body was in my late twenties. I took
Speaker 1: my scale. I took it to an alley way behind
Speaker 1: my apartment, and I smashed it with a hammer, and
Speaker 1: then I tossed it into a dumpster. Hard a number
Speaker 1: fluctuating every day and not reflecting muscle or water was
Speaker 1: doing so much damage psychologically, and so I switched it
Speaker 1: and I tried to focus on how many steps I
Speaker 1: was getting each day, because I knew the days that
Speaker 1: I went on walks, especially if I was outside, I
Speaker 1: felt less anxious and sad and have more energy. And
Speaker 1: if you can't take walks, We've done other episodes about
Speaker 1: how just going outside, being around a tree for a
Speaker 1: few minutes can provide a psychological boost. But yeah, for me,
Speaker 1: scales are garbage, literal garbage. And actually went to the
Speaker 1: doctor this week and it was a gynecology clinic and
Speaker 1: they actually had their scale set to kilograms, which as
Speaker 1: an American, I was like, sweet, I don't know what
Speaker 1: that is about. I have no idea. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: think about it or google it because that's not the point. Well,
Speaker 1: when it comes to yo yo dieting, I know. The
Speaker 1: worst health I was ever in body mass wise, depression wise,
Speaker 1: like autoimmune stuff wise, was when I was trying to
Speaker 1: get skinnier and I just when given the opportunity I
Speaker 1: could eat like half a jar of peanut butter because
Speaker 1: I was just so pissed to be depriving myself. So
Speaker 1: I know that yo yo dieting is part of it
Speaker 1: is probably psychological, but how much, too, is that metabolic?
Speaker 1: And how do people avoid that if they're just like,
Speaker 1: fuck this?
Speaker 4: It is so hard? And what I hate is when
Speaker 4: people have these kind of conversations with folks like you
Speaker 4: and they say, well, here's what you'd have to do.
Speaker 4: You know, like there's one easy answer that people haven't
Speaker 4: already tried. So I'll just start by saying it's hard.
Speaker 4: And my suggestion is too, if you are pissed off
Speaker 4: and feeling deprived on whatever food you know, whatever diet
Speaker 4: you're on or whatever nutrition plan you're kind of trying
Speaker 4: to stick to, then you're not on one that's going
Speaker 4: to be sustainable and you got to find one that's better.
Speaker 4: And you know, that's where I do think there's a
Speaker 4: place for or intermittent fasting or for low carb diets
Speaker 4: if you keep them they're done in a healthy way,
Speaker 4: or for vegan diets or Mediterranean or whatever. But that's
Speaker 4: I know, it's hard, and.
Speaker 1: It's a lifestyle, not a diet, right, I know that
Speaker 1: I'd be like my goal weight and then I'd be
Speaker 1: like sweet go. It's like a double decker tago talk
Speaker 1: about that, I'm like, what happened?
Speaker 4: Why do I weird it?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Okay, first off, I love double decker tacos. Also, when
Speaker 1: I'm sick or I have a migraine, all I want
Speaker 1: is a diet doctor, pepper and Cheetos. And it's disgusting,
Speaker 1: but it's a decision made not by my body but
Speaker 1: by my soul. But Hermann told me that we all
Speaker 1: have a little bit of magical thinking around this stuff too,
Speaker 1: and it's really hard in modern culture and with the
Speaker 1: food available to folks in food deserts, on lower incomes,
Speaker 1: and really anyone to track how much fuel we're putting
Speaker 1: into our bodies and how our individual endocrine and are
Speaker 1: a lot of systems are going to react to them.
Speaker 1: And Hermann says that there's such a stigma around body
Speaker 1: image and health and so much undo blame on individuals
Speaker 1: that it turns into a mental challenge and a stress
Speaker 1: to just try to tally numbers and understand this really
Speaker 1: complex and impossible system that he's been studying for over
Speaker 1: a decade and if you have access to healthcare, talk
Speaker 1: to a trusted doctor and maybe get your thyroid or
Speaker 1: your blood sugars checked if you're feeling a little off.
Speaker 1: But okay, onward to some of the forty nine pages
Speaker 1: of questions we got for Herman. I have so many
Speaker 1: questions from listeners. Can I lob them some at you?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: That's why I'm here, isn't it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yes, yes, okay, But first let's donate to a
Speaker 1: charity of the ologist choosing, and Herman said the choice
Speaker 1: was very easy and he'd like to go to the
Speaker 1: hods Of Fund. And the hods Of Fund provides healthcare
Speaker 1: to this hunter gatherer community by funding an ambulance for
Speaker 1: the critically ill, resources, food and medicine during hospital stays,
Speaker 1: as well as preventive healthcare like mistakes nuts to compat
Speaker 1: the Spreadamle area. And to find out more, you can
Speaker 1: go to hudsofund dot org. So thanks to sponsor the
Speaker 1: show who made that donation possible.
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Speaker 1: Okay, Let's get some burning questions off your chest, including
Speaker 1: this first one about metabolic speed, which was on the
Speaker 1: minds of Julie Scott, Olga Down and Eric Easton, Ann
Speaker 1: Marie Everheart, Michael Wegman, Linastot, Lisa Roll, Sophia A, Sharon,
Speaker 1: Tara Lee Johnson, Valerie Bertha first time question asker Angie
Speaker 1: Smith and Abigail lad uh Is in Denver.
Speaker 4: Hi, Abigail, I.
Speaker 6: Am curious about the idea that we can speed up
Speaker 6: or slow down our metabolism just with like products, particularly
Speaker 6: the Biggest Loser study. The Biggest Loser study showed that
Speaker 6: like extreme dieting caused a slowdown in people's metabolisms. But
Speaker 6: then there's been some sort of debunking out of that
Speaker 6: that I've seen, so it seems to be really conflicting,
Speaker 6: and I'm just I would love clarification.
Speaker 4: Well, so the first question was the easier one, which
Speaker 4: is are there products out there that can boost your metabolism?
Speaker 4: And the answer is no, okay, with a caveat.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 4: The caveat is there are some illegal things you can
Speaker 4: do that will boost your metabolism that are not recommended.
Speaker 4: And you know, so that's partly a joke. There are
Speaker 4: some illegal things you can do that would boos your metaboism,
Speaker 4: but you shouldn't do them because they'll kill you.
Speaker 1: Like, are those things you snort? Are those things you
Speaker 1: get illegally by prescription?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So moving on, there's I don't know actually, so
Speaker 4: they used to sell this one Africa. God, I'm blank
Speaker 4: on the name of it. That would speed of your metabolism.
Speaker 4: It made your mitochondria leaky, and so they would just
Speaker 4: burn through all this energy trying to charge your ATPs.
Speaker 1: Okay, So side note, I believe Harmond is talking about
Speaker 1: this drug known as two for dnitrophenol or DNP for short,
Speaker 1: and it's been used in things like bombs and pesticides,
Speaker 1: but taken by a live humans, it ups your metabolism
Speaker 1: by thirty to forty percent, which of course can melt
Speaker 1: away excess fat. It can also cause rapid heart rate,
Speaker 1: cardiac arrest, sell death, and hyperthermia, meaning you literally cook yourself.
Speaker 1: DNP can also very much kill you, so much so
Speaker 1: that people have used it to unalive themselves. So yeah, no,
Speaker 1: not worth it. You are wonderful as you are, which
Speaker 1: is living and breathing, and so has.
Speaker 4: They had to stop selling it. But obviously it's super
Speaker 4: terrible and really dangerous to mess with your metabolism that way.
Speaker 4: So no, your coffee in the morning gives you like
Speaker 4: maybe like a little tiny little bump bum, but you
Speaker 4: cannot boost your metabolism. Everybody out there trying to boost
Speaker 4: your metabolism with whatever settlement you're buying, you're just being robbed.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, Please, for your own sake, just stop. You
Speaker 4: can't even really boost your metabolism very much with exercise,
Speaker 4: it turns out, what and that's one of the big surprises. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so when you're exercising, you burn more calories. That's true
Speaker 4: while you're exercising, and if you started your exercise program,
Speaker 4: then yeah, for those first few weeks, you know, you'll
Speaker 4: be burning more calories by the end of the day
Speaker 4: than you were before you started it. But this really
Speaker 4: interesting phenomenon happens where your body adjusts and so after
Speaker 4: a few months you're not burning a whole lot more
Speaker 4: than you were when you started, and maybe not any
Speaker 4: more than you were and when you started. And so
Speaker 4: you know, that's some of the really surprising work that's
Speaker 4: come out of my lab and some others.
Speaker 1: So apart from field work, observations and interviews, what does
Speaker 1: this lab work entail? Okay, Well, in his book, Herman
Speaker 1: explains how difficult it was to do this research in
Speaker 1: decades past, when you'd have to essentially lock someone in
Speaker 1: a metabolic chamber and measure the ratios of carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: and oxygen in the room and also collect p from
Speaker 1: the entire state to analyze for metabolites of protein and stuff.
Speaker 1: But then in the n nineties, when mass spectrometry analysis
Speaker 1: became more affordable, scientists were able to do this in
Speaker 1: called the doubly labeled water method, and they had used
Speaker 1: this before in smaller animals, but it was more affordable
Speaker 1: now to use in humans. And this involves people drinking
Speaker 1: a water sample with special non radioactive isotopes of hydrogen
Speaker 1: and oxygen and then later analyzing a PA sample, maybe
Speaker 1: two weeks later, to see how much carbon dioxide they
Speaker 1: had produced based on what's left of the isotopes. So water,
Speaker 1: some PA, some mass spectrometry. So much easier than an
Speaker 1: air lock chamber, and yes, more affordable. And he writes
Speaker 1: in burn, So what's the bottom line, how many calories
Speaker 1: do we spend each day? It depends, of course, but
Speaker 1: not on the factors you might think.
Speaker 4: Here, here's a fun snapshot for you. We're talking about
Speaker 4: hundre gatherers before. So my lab our group did the
Speaker 4: first measurements of calories burned per day in a hunter
Speaker 4: gatherer group. We went and worked with these folks called
Speaker 4: the Hods in Nord of Tanzania, and they get more
Speaker 4: physical activity in a day than most Americans, getting a
Speaker 4: weak you know, hunting wild game and getting wild plant foods.
Speaker 4: But despite that, despite that, to our enormous surprise, because
Speaker 4: we did not expect this going in, they burn the
Speaker 4: same number of calories every days as Americans do. What's
Speaker 4: going on, Yeah, because their bodies have adjusted to this
Speaker 4: really rigorous lifestyle and they're say with energy elsewhere. And
Speaker 4: your body will do that too if you start exercising
Speaker 4: a new exercise program, so you know, you might not
Speaker 4: sort of wipe out the entirety of the exercise bump,
Speaker 4: but a lot of it.
Speaker 1: And even if you increase your muscle mass by a lot,
Speaker 1: like of your weightlifting.
Speaker 4: Well, so that's interesting. So that's understudied. You know, most
Speaker 4: of the exercises people do to lose weight or like cardio,
Speaker 4: and you don't gain a lot of muscle mass, so
Speaker 4: that's not even a factor. If you do gain a
Speaker 4: lot of muscle mass, then what we would expect that is,
Speaker 4: you know for your size, Yeah, sure you're going to
Speaker 4: increase your energy expenditure because you've gotten bigger. Right back
Speaker 4: to this sole issue of Yeah, what is metabolismal it's
Speaker 4: your body at work. If there's more of you, yes,
Speaker 4: you'll burn more calories. But for your size, we don't
Speaker 4: think your expenditureill go up that much.
Speaker 1: Wow, So it's mostly diet, as they say, oh, in.
Speaker 4: Terms of your weight. Yeah, I mean it's like it's
Speaker 4: not even worth worrying about exercise for weight.
Speaker 1: Hang on, very important message here.
Speaker 4: You should still exercise, by the way, it's really good
Speaker 4: for you, and some of those adjustments that your body
Speaker 4: makes and response exercise are probably some of the reasons
Speaker 4: exercise is so darn good for you. So I'm on
Speaker 4: team exercise one hundred percent. But we have to think
Speaker 4: about exercise and diet as two different tools for two
Speaker 4: different jobs. So diet's about diet for your weight and
Speaker 4: exercise for everything else.
Speaker 1: What about the serotonin component and the endorphins? Is it
Speaker 1: mental health? I understand that exercise can be as effective
Speaker 1: as some antidepressants.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right, And there's lots of
Speaker 4: great studies out there showing exercise interventions for depression is
Speaker 4: a really really good, like you say, as good as
Speaker 4: a lot of the drugs people take.
Speaker 1: Plenty of studies. Yes, so go ahead, get yourself a
Speaker 1: wing back chair, get a big cup of tea, and
Speaker 1: settle in for years of reading published studies. Cobwebs are
Speaker 1: going to grow on your arms because there's a lot.
Speaker 1: But here are a couple samples. So the twenty seventeen
Speaker 1: to meta analysis titled is the Comparison between Exercise and
Speaker 1: Pharmacologic Treatment of Depression and the Clinical Practice Guideline of
Speaker 1: the American College of Physicians Evidence based in the journal
Speaker 1: Frontiers of Pharmacology, gave a recap of experiments and it
Speaker 1: found that three randomized clinical trials compared four months of
Speaker 1: exercise to just antidepressants, and that all of these studies
Speaker 1: reported that exercise and standard antidepressant treatments were equally effective.
Speaker 1: And then another twenty fifteen study in the British Journal
Speaker 1: of Psychiatry called Physical Exercise for Late life Major Depression
Speaker 1: showed that the greatest improvements people had were with high
Speaker 1: intensity aerobics, followed by low intensity aerobics, followed by just antidepressants.
Speaker 1: And other studies showed that exercise and medication can be
Speaker 1: an effective, too pronged intervention for major depression. So what
Speaker 1: is the message here, Well, it's not for me because
Speaker 1: I'm not board certified and shit, so you have to
Speaker 1: talk to a doctor and under no circumstances go off
Speaker 1: antidepressants on your own. And I say this as your friend,
Speaker 1: I say this as your internet father. And this spring,
Speaker 1: I've mentioned this before, but I went off a fexer
Speaker 1: to try medication for ADHD instead and for my hormonal issues.
Speaker 1: And guess who ended up in the er with a
Speaker 1: panic attack?
Speaker 4: That was me?
Speaker 1: Remember that that was me, And of course you don't remember,
Speaker 1: because I don't know if I mentioned it. But my
Speaker 1: point is, please do research, talk to a doctor, don't
Speaker 1: go cold turkey on your own, and also make sure
Speaker 1: that your loved ones know that you're changing any medication
Speaker 1: and that you have a lot of loving support, or
Speaker 1: better yet, maybe just consider adding exercise to your medications
Speaker 1: if you're physically able to, and see if you feel
Speaker 1: more amazing. And if you're feeling like garbage and are
Speaker 1: feeding yourself garbage like I sometimes do, remind yourself that
Speaker 1: your body deserves fuel and nutrients, and that companies marketing
Speaker 1: you things are in it to make money, not to
Speaker 1: make you happy. But what happens if you do all
Speaker 1: this and you start to feel healthier. And then that
Speaker 1: second part. Yeah, so the slow down in people's metabolisms
Speaker 1: after they diet, that's a bit of a myth.
Speaker 4: No, So that's depressingly true. So you can slow your meaphilism,
Speaker 4: you just can't speed it up if you lose a
Speaker 4: lot of weight like they did in the Biggest Loser.
Speaker 4: People like people lost a human's worth of weight. It
Speaker 4: was talk about unsustainable. It was completely unsustainable the way
Speaker 4: they did it. And so the folks who managed to
Speaker 4: keep a lot of that weight off even six years later,
Speaker 4: their metabolic rate was still slower than you'd expect for
Speaker 4: their size. Their body was still kind of trying to
Speaker 4: write the ship right, it's a survival response. Tons of
Speaker 4: weight right away, really fast your body. You're an evolved organism.
Speaker 4: We've been evolving for millions and millions of years. We
Speaker 4: have all these mechanisms in place that say, look, times
Speaker 4: are tough, we've got to tighten our belts and lower
Speaker 4: the metabolism until things get better again. And so that's real.
Speaker 4: That absolutely is real. And people in the Biggest Loser
Speaker 4: who kept the weight off for six years, their bodies
Speaker 4: are still in that mode, and the people who gained
Speaker 4: all the weight back, well, their metabolism's recovered because their
Speaker 4: bodies were like, Yep, we did it. Good job, guys.
Speaker 1: And I imagine it's just evolutionary processes helping protect you
Speaker 1: from future famines.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly every species will do this, just as far
Speaker 4: as we can tell, any species given the opportunity to
Speaker 4: put on extra weight will And it seems to be
Speaker 4: because it has just been a truism, a fact of
Speaker 4: life for the hundreds of millions of years that animals
Speaker 4: have been evolving, that you could always end up time,
Speaker 4: and so you always better be prepared.
Speaker 1: And yes, it's hypothesized that some people's bodies have a
Speaker 1: thrifty genotype and they're more efficient at surviving those lean times.
Speaker 1: But our relationship with processed and high calorie and low
Speaker 1: cost foods presents a challenge to tell our brains that
Speaker 1: we have to contradict hundreds of thousands of years of
Speaker 1: survival instincts and genetics every time we walk into a
Speaker 1: grocery store. Does cinnamon or ginger or any other herbs
Speaker 1: or spices actually do anything for your metabolism? I myself
Speaker 1: put cayenne pepper and black pepper in my chai every day,
Speaker 1: but for flavor. But the idea that you can take
Speaker 1: like a capsasted pill and be like the kittie season,
Speaker 1: that is not true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sorry, Cindy.
Speaker 1: What about individual variation? This was wanted to know by
Speaker 1: patrons Lovely Bites.
Speaker 3: R J.
Speaker 1: Dorige, Hannah Raidel, Matthew Welker, Amanda loves Kurt Quincy j
Speaker 1: Byurne missed the fish, Felipe Hamenaz School next Door, Monica Olvera,
Speaker 1: Margo Lewis, Sarah Morecom, Griffin Russell, Julie Scott, and member
Speaker 1: of the BFF audio asking tier on Patreon. Aaron Ryan says, Look,
Speaker 1: we're all thinking it. Why does my metabolism suck? Oh?
Speaker 4: I've got good news for you. Okay, it doesn't suck,
Speaker 4: all right.
Speaker 1: Some of us do have just.
Speaker 4: Because of our genes, or you know, maybe because of
Speaker 4: the way the conditions which we grew up. We're not
Speaker 4: entirely sure, but some of us do burn more calories
Speaker 4: than others. That's true, just inherently. But and we've done
Speaker 4: this study in our own lab, We've done done in
Speaker 4: other places. People who have slow metabolisms aren't necessarily more
Speaker 4: likely to gain weight. People who have fast metabolisms aren't
Speaker 4: necessarily less likely to gain weight. So we always blame
Speaker 4: our metabolisms. But the fact of the matter is it
Speaker 4: really comes down to your brain. So your metabolism is great,
Speaker 4: it's your brain that's given you trouble, and it's giving
Speaker 4: you trouble because you know you're surrounded by all this
Speaker 4: really delicious food that you can't It's hard to pull
Speaker 4: yourself away from.
Speaker 1: So many people. Greg Lewis, Valerie Bertha, Ryan Walsh, Les Johnson,
Speaker 1: Cala Turnbill Matthew Wynn and Earl of Grahamlcan also Lena
Speaker 1: Schuster and Jolly Hamali, Rebecca Cloud, Daniel Kelly, Hannah Boyd,
Speaker 1: Average Pie, Lauren Arn, Renio Mandre, Margie and Dexter and
Speaker 1: CC papers all asked, in Greg's words, how does aging
Speaker 1: affect metabolism and does being an active senior make a difference?
Speaker 1: Does it slow down as you get older. I've read
Speaker 1: some of your research and I know the answer, but.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is one of the most fun studies I
Speaker 4: got to be part of. Over the last couple of years,
Speaker 4: we've finally put together this like roadmap of your metabolism
Speaker 4: from birth till very old age, and so we know
Speaker 4: the answer to that. So first of all, as you
Speaker 4: grow up and get bigger, there's more of you, you
Speaker 4: burn more calories. Right, So bigger people burn more calories.
Speaker 4: Men tend to burn more cal than women because this
Speaker 4: gets back to the you know what kind of weight
Speaker 4: are you carrying? Women tend to carry a bit more
Speaker 4: fat for a given body size. Men tend to carry
Speaker 4: a bit less. And so if you know fat is quiet,
Speaker 4: other tissues aren't. So men tend to burn them fit
Speaker 4: more calories just because the body composition difference. Once you
Speaker 4: control for that, men women are the same.
Speaker 1: So the numbers crunched in most studies are based on
Speaker 1: the model of sex assigned a berth But my non
Speaker 1: binary and transpals I see you.
Speaker 4: So bigger is more more fat free mass, you burn
Speaker 4: more calories. But once you control for that, So now
Speaker 4: we're talking about like a like we're thinking about this
Speaker 4: in terms of like pound for pound, Right, for a
Speaker 4: given size, how does your metabolism change, Well, it's really
Speaker 4: high when you're a kid from about one year old's
Speaker 4: at the peak. Right, one year olds are burning fifty
Speaker 4: percent more calories they need to expect for somebody their
Speaker 4: body size, which is kind of incredible. And it's because
Speaker 4: of all the stuff that our cells are doing all
Speaker 4: day to grow and be active and develop. And then
Speaker 4: you peak at about one year old, and then you
Speaker 4: sort of slowly come down through childhood and teenage years,
Speaker 4: and in your early twenties you hit your adult level.
Speaker 4: So whatever you and I are at, Alley and Greg,
Speaker 4: you two and me and where all of us adults,
Speaker 4: we're at our metabolism kind of plateau, and we're going
Speaker 4: to stay there. You're there from your twenties through your
Speaker 4: late fifties.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, late fifties.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it really doesn't change with menopause. It really doesn't
Speaker 4: change as testotal levels go down in men And I
Speaker 4: was really sure it did. I'm forties, I'm in my forties,
Speaker 4: and I was really sure that my metabolism must be
Speaker 4: slower than it was when I was thirty, And you know,
Speaker 4: it just doesn't look like that's true. And then after
Speaker 4: sixty it starts to decline. So that decline is real,
Speaker 4: and so active seniors, it might be the case that's
Speaker 4: staying really active as a senior sixty years plus is
Speaker 4: a way to kind of keep that decline at bay
Speaker 4: What we'd love to know is, so, Okay, when we
Speaker 4: see metabolism starting to slow down around sixty, that's your
Speaker 4: cells becoming less active, right, they're slowly kind of turning
Speaker 4: down the volume nod there on everything they're doing. That's
Speaker 4: around the same time that people start to get sick.
Speaker 4: Your likelihood of heart disease dementia really starts to kick
Speaker 4: up around the same time. And so that makes us
Speaker 4: think those things are related. And so if we can
Speaker 4: keep our cells more active, do we keep those diseases
Speaker 4: associated with old age at bay Man? Wouldn't that be
Speaker 4: cool to know? And wouldn't it be great to be
Speaker 4: able to use that kind of therapeutically. But that's next
Speaker 4: step and for.
Speaker 1: More inspiration to take Zooma classes until you're ninety other
Speaker 1: than just having sweet sweet moves. You can see the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one paper titled the Active Grandparent Hypothesis Physical
Speaker 1: Activity and Evolution of extended human health spans and lifespans,
Speaker 1: and it summed up several previous studies that showed that
Speaker 1: about twenty minutes a day of moderate physical activity or
Speaker 1: twelve minutes a day of vigorous aerobic activity reduces average
Speaker 1: otherwise sedentary person's relative risk of all cause mortality by
Speaker 1: fifty percent. So you do that twenty minutes a day,
Speaker 1: twelve minutes a day of harder activity, your mortality rates
Speaker 1: go down by fifty percent, which if you live in
Speaker 1: the United States, that can help you dodge medical bills
Speaker 1: that could bankrupt you. So that's a plus. So the
Speaker 1: active grant parent hypothesis what is that? It's won by
Speaker 1: evolutionary anthropologists to answer the question doesn't nature just want
Speaker 1: your babies and then for you to die? Why would
Speaker 1: humans have evolved to be so active and not dead
Speaker 1: after they reproduce? Well. Researchers found that in the Hatsa
Speaker 1: and other hunter gatherer societies, active grandparents will forge for
Speaker 1: up to six hours a day, taking that burden off
Speaker 1: of new mothers who are tending to the squirmy little babies.
Speaker 1: So the active grandparents out there foraging bring in more
Speaker 1: calories for the whole community, kind of like when Grandma
Speaker 1: sneaks to you an ice cream sandwich and you both
Speaker 1: promise not to tell your parents. Also, before any of
Speaker 1: you write me letters I love you, but before anyone
Speaker 1: writes me a letter. Yes, calories is the same thing
Speaker 1: colloquially as a killo calorie. Technically a calorie is one
Speaker 1: one thousand of what we call a calorie. But yes,
Speaker 1: it's just confusing terminology. I don't make the roles. Denise
Speaker 1: and Scott want to know, is six meals a day
Speaker 1: to boost metabolism? Is that debunked? Six small meals?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, I don't even I'm not even sure exactly
Speaker 4: what they're talking about, but I can promise you it
Speaker 4: doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Okay, You'll see sometimes and like, how does this person
Speaker 1: who's definitely head like libosection, how do they do it?
Speaker 1: And they're like six small meals a day and you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: but then intermittent fasting goes completely against that. But I
Speaker 1: know people had questions about intermittent festing, such as Elliot Mcatarsny,
Speaker 1: Amanda Washington, Norma Vasquez, Lana Schuster, Monica Olvera, Denise since
Speaker 1: Cottology Files, and Elizabeth Firf Brownoff, Kate Munker, Aaron Gunderson,
Speaker 1: Emily Staffer, Vanessa Fray, and Ellen Monroe. Does that slow
Speaker 1: your metabolism because you're not eating for twelve hours it's
Speaker 1: sixteen hours a day or is that not enough to
Speaker 1: mess it up?
Speaker 4: The bigger switch on your metabolism is, you know, think
Speaker 4: about it in terms of like days or weeks of
Speaker 4: energy balance. So if you're intermittent fasting, but you're not
Speaker 4: seeing the weight on the mathroom scale change really fast, right,
Speaker 4: Because when you're allowed to eat, you're eating enough that
Speaker 4: you aren't losing weight in a really hot, fast rate,
Speaker 4: then you're probably going to keep the metabolism impact pretty small.
Speaker 1: Okay, what do you do? Do you have a walking
Speaker 1: pad under your desk? Were you ever a chubby bunny
Speaker 1: as a kid.
Speaker 4: I, personally, you know, I've never had to really worry
Speaker 4: about my weight. I'm one of those annoying people who don't.
Speaker 4: And I was a really skinny kid. My mom was
Speaker 4: like trying to pack me full of food whenever she could. Honestly,
Speaker 4: I think it fits the research, which is, you know,
Speaker 4: I don't think about food very much. I just kind
Speaker 4: of don't care. I like good food more than that,
Speaker 4: I like nice meals with good friends. You know, my
Speaker 4: wife she'll tell you she thinks about you know, lunch
Speaker 4: and dinner and snacks more often than I do. I
Speaker 4: think that's just true.
Speaker 1: And that is is that that's hardwired, that's hormonal, that's
Speaker 1: oh you hyd genetics questions, how do you write?
Speaker 4: Joe B.
Speaker 1: Mattzcato, Valerie, Bertha Pafka thirty four, Devin McPeek, Aaron Burbridge,
Speaker 1: Matthew Walker, Diana Moreno, Magdalena Castillo, Katherine Megovich, k Colincroft,
Speaker 1: Lannis j. And first time questionsker missus Noak. So, how
Speaker 1: much of your gene size is based on your gene size?
Speaker 4: And so those are the genes that are important as
Speaker 4: far as we can tell. I'm going to say all
Speaker 4: of them, certainly almost all of them are active in
Speaker 4: your brain. It's how you're wired. And it probably also
Speaker 4: you know, your brain isn't a static thing. That's when
Speaker 4: people get brains wrong. Born with the brain that you
Speaker 4: have right now, right, your brain is a work in
Speaker 4: progress from the beginning, and so the genes that helped
Speaker 4: build your brain matter, but also the experiences you use
Speaker 4: to finish off and build those connections, and so probably
Speaker 4: both of them together. But by the time you're an adult, right,
Speaker 4: the cake is baked and your response to food is
Speaker 4: what it is, and you're kind of working with what
Speaker 4: you've got.
Speaker 1: What about the guts? Patrons Catherine Fox, Bonnie M. Rutherford,
Speaker 1: Nathan Howard, Nicole Austin, Earl of Gramlican Tristan Berg, Jesse
Speaker 1: k and Catherine B. First time question asker. This one
Speaker 1: is for all of your simmering intestines as well as
Speaker 1: in a Ukley Emily isis hey Artemis random question? Yes,
Speaker 1: Karah dut damn it.
Speaker 4: I knew it was coming.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: Alana says this may be gross, but I'm so curious
Speaker 1: and wondering if there's any connection between metabolism. And they
Speaker 1: say bowl movements, I think they mean bowel movements, but
Speaker 1: that is let's hope. So that's a good typeot. But
Speaker 1: how does your digestion change your metabolism if it moves
Speaker 1: more slowly, do you have more society which I always
Speaker 1: thought was pronuncatiety or what's going on.
Speaker 4: There's a great study actually out over the summer that
Speaker 4: showed that we had people on two different diets, and
Speaker 4: the really highly processed food diet, their guts were able
Speaker 4: to absorb more calories more efficiently, and so they're getting
Speaker 4: more of the calories that they put in their mouths
Speaker 4: actually go into their body rather than into the toilet, right,
Speaker 4: And people on the high fiber called the microbiome, you know,
Speaker 4: but the microbiome happiness diet or something like that, it was,
Speaker 4: that's not really it. It was something like the meant
Speaker 4: to help their microbiomes had more fiber, was harder to digest,
Speaker 4: and they absorbed fewer of those calories and more pass
Speaker 4: through them. And so there you go. You know, that's
Speaker 4: something that simple. You can see it in action. That absolutely,
Speaker 4: the way that your guts work, the efficiency with which
Speaker 4: you pullies out of your food and in your bloodstream,
Speaker 4: the kind of foods you're feeding yourself which will have
Speaker 4: an effect on that. All of those factors are going
Speaker 4: to are going to play a role. This is the
Speaker 4: ultimate multiplayer game metabolism. And so to think that it's
Speaker 4: just one thing, it probably is never just one thing.
Speaker 4: But it's okay, it's not wrong to think about all
Speaker 4: the parts that work together. But they are just parts
Speaker 4: that work together, and the ones that are sustainable they
Speaker 4: make you eat fewer calories without feeling miserable.
Speaker 1: Does the carnivore diet drive you crazy? Because evolutionarily we
Speaker 1: evolve to eat the plants as well.
Speaker 4: What drives me crazy is when people want to sort
Speaker 4: of rewrite history and say, you know, it's not enough
Speaker 4: for them that the carnivore diet works for them. It
Speaker 4: has to be the one, single perfect diet to rule
Speaker 4: them all, and it has to be proven by the
Speaker 4: fact that, of course, don't you know, dummy, that we
Speaker 4: evolved to only eat meat. That just pissed me off,
Speaker 4: because the evidence is really clear that humans have been
Speaker 4: needing a lot of plants forever, except in certain special
Speaker 4: circumstances like the Arctic. So like, man, why do you
Speaker 4: have to ruin what we know about human evolution? What
Speaker 4: took so long for people to figure out? And you
Speaker 4: got to run it just so that you can like
Speaker 4: enjoy your diet and be snooty. I don't get yeah again.
Speaker 1: For more on what hunter gatherers do eat, grab his
Speaker 1: book burn which is linked in the show notes, to
Speaker 1: learn about his years of research and befriending the Hods
Speaker 1: of community in northern Tanzania. And I burned through it
Speaker 1: in a few days and it's already influenced how I'm
Speaker 1: taking care of my bod and my bod which has
Speaker 1: been kind of a shit show of pneumonia and hormone chaos.
Speaker 1: Is thanking me for caring? Actually back to hormones, you know,
Speaker 1: we had some great questions about hormone replacement therapy. You know,
Speaker 1: and I know that menopause itself and aging itself doesn't
Speaker 1: sell you metabolism, but anu Ya Joshi, Kate de Hadway,
Speaker 1: interstitial k learnarn Dione need him. Rebecca Rome, jen A,
Speaker 1: Britney Corrigan, Law, Lisa Rohl, and Kay Shannon, as well
Speaker 1: as Lisa Panic asked about during paramenopause and menopause having
Speaker 1: less testosterone does that affect your ability to build muscle mass?
Speaker 4: And oh yeah.
Speaker 1: We also had great questions from some trans listeners Keegan Newman,
Speaker 1: Wayne Halliburton, and Jude Scout Campbell, who asked, in Judes words,
Speaker 1: I'm a transmask person about to hit the two year
Speaker 1: mark on testosterone gender affirming hormone therapy. Both myself and
Speaker 1: pretty much anyone on tea ever experiences what feels like
Speaker 1: an increase in metabolism. Why does this happen? When will
Speaker 1: it chill out?
Speaker 4: Please?
Speaker 1: I'm hungry all the time, and who among us can
Speaker 1: afford that many groceries in this economy. Thanks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So testosterone is what's called an anabolic hormone. It builds,
Speaker 4: It makes your bodies build, It makes your cells more active.
Speaker 4: That is why people dope with testosterone MidiX Okay, And
Speaker 4: that's and they're illegal because they're incredibly effective. Right. And
Speaker 4: so if you are on testosterone for whatever reason, Yeah,
Speaker 4: your cells are more active, you're gonna be probably bringing
Speaker 4: more calories and certainly your body's going to send in
Speaker 4: the signals hey let's build some muscle, because that's what
Speaker 4: it's good at. So when it will it go away? Man?
Speaker 4: That's actually an interesting question. I don't know.
Speaker 1: And then if you're in menopausa for some reason, your
Speaker 1: estrogen goes up or down. I understand a lot of
Speaker 1: bird control pills and SSRIs can change your body composition
Speaker 1: a lot. So what's going on with the estrogen? Okay?
Speaker 1: I asked these estrogen and SSRI questions for y'all, Megan Bolton,
Speaker 1: Shelby Smith, Tyane cole Is, Lizzy Martinez Medal and Uncle
Speaker 1: Kendall m Kelsey Larson, and Britty Kaufman.
Speaker 4: We know what hormones are being given in those cases
Speaker 4: or what hormones are extra I don't know that. We
Speaker 4: have lots of great studies that are sort of counting
Speaker 4: calories in that context or measuring calories very well. And
Speaker 4: so this is just my impression of what's going to
Speaker 4: happen physiologically. And he mentioned SSRIs. Those are all kind
Speaker 4: of different systems. So just stosterone and androgens generally are
Speaker 4: muscle building anabolic hormones that are going to tend to
Speaker 4: ramp that up. The hormones that are taken for oral
Speaker 4: contraception actually mimic the hormonal state of pregnancy, and so
Speaker 4: or the second half of the ovarian cycle, which is
Speaker 4: the same as the early parts of pregnancy. You've kind
Speaker 4: of kicked in some mechanisms sort of early pregnancy mechanisms
Speaker 4: there to put on some weight. And then the SSRI
Speaker 4: thing seems to be back to the reward systems in
Speaker 4: the brain and that you're manipulating those systems, and one
Speaker 4: of the outcomes is going to be the way that
Speaker 4: you respond to the reward of food.
Speaker 1: So if you experience more cravings for carbohydrates as your
Speaker 1: depression lifts from antidepressants, you can keep an eye on intake,
Speaker 1: or you could not care and enjoy more pasta and smiling.
Speaker 1: I'm not a medical doctor even a little bit, but
Speaker 1: do whatever keeps you healthy and happy. But let's get
Speaker 1: back to misery. Last questions I always ask, are worst
Speaker 1: thing about your job? What sucks? What's hard?
Speaker 4: I love my job.
Speaker 1: There's got to be something that sucks. Paperwork.
Speaker 4: I'll tell you what. Yeah, I'll tell you what sucks.
Speaker 4: There is so much regulation right now around the actual
Speaker 4: performance of science in American universities. You know, I have
Speaker 4: so many trainings and regulatory things I have to do,
Speaker 4: and it's all well intentioned and you know, but there's
Speaker 4: so much of it. There's so much of it. We're
Speaker 4: paying this person at my university to talk to this
Speaker 4: person at my university. So that's the only frustrating thing
Speaker 4: I think. I love to teach, and I love to
Speaker 4: do research, and I feel like I am one of
Speaker 4: the luckiest people I know in terms of the career
Speaker 4: I get to have.
Speaker 1: Do you ever lose sleep over it? And does that
Speaker 1: affect your metabolism?
Speaker 4: Yes? And yes?
Speaker 1: Oh so sleep does affect their metabolism?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, if you get completely sleep deprived. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: You love your job. Is there a certain moment or
Speaker 1: a certain factor of it is just your favorite.
Speaker 4: Just talking to you.
Speaker 1: Ali, Oh stop, I've asked so many not smart questions,
Speaker 1: and I really appreciate this is probably one of the
Speaker 1: most like frenetic episodes where I'm like, what about that questions?
Speaker 4: Honestly, So there's there's there's two things I love about
Speaker 4: my job, and one is I have had the amazing
Speaker 4: good fortune a handful of times in my career to
Speaker 4: be the first at least feels like the first person
Speaker 4: ever to see something or to figure something out. You know,
Speaker 4: it's the discovery. I think every scientist lose for that,
Speaker 4: and any science has been around a while and has
Speaker 4: had some success that has felt that and that's you
Speaker 4: live for that. I mean, there's nothing better than that.
Speaker 4: And then the other thing I really do enjoy is
Speaker 4: talking to science, uh, you know, whether that's teaching, or
Speaker 4: whether that's writing, or whether that's predations like this. I
Speaker 4: love to be able to share that because I think
Speaker 4: that's you know, that's part of the job too, and
Speaker 4: it's a really fun one.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 4: This is really fun.
Speaker 1: So ask informed people uninformed questions, and thank you so much,
Speaker 1: Doctor Herman. Poncer for the time that you spent with
Speaker 1: us and all the research that you continue to do again.
Speaker 1: His book is titled Burn. It's linked in the show notes,
Speaker 1: and we'll also link his labs website and his Instagram
Speaker 1: and his Twitter ex handles, so you can follow him there.
Speaker 1: We're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm Ali
Speaker 1: Ward with one l on both and we have shorter,
Speaker 1: kid friendly cuts of our classic episodes and those are
Speaker 1: called smologies and they're available for free. They're at aliward
Speaker 1: dot com Smologies and Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group.
Speaker 1: Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Noel Dilworth is our
Speaker 1: scheduling producer, Susan Hale is managing director. Kelly R. Dwyer
Speaker 1: makes our website and can make yours, and our lead
Speaker 1: editor in this episode produced and contributed a ton of
Speaker 1: excellent research from her own dissertation Sapiens. Indeed, Mercedes Maitland
Speaker 1: of Maitland Audio and Nick Thorburn made the theme music.
Speaker 1: And if you stick around it till the end of
Speaker 1: the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week
Speaker 1: is kind of weird, Okay. So I was working on
Speaker 1: this right. I was listening to a playlist of like
Speaker 1: some new indie music and there was this one song
Speaker 1: called drop Dead by Katie Kirby, and no joke, there's
Speaker 1: a line about body mass indexes, and I was like,
Speaker 1: get out of my head music, what are you doing
Speaker 1: to me right now? It is creepy, but it was fun,
Speaker 1: So there you go. But yeah, put on a song, maybe,
Speaker 1: enjoy some fresh air, be good to your flesh machine,
Speaker 1: and most importantly, be good to each other.
Speaker 5: All right.
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