Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

by Herman Pontzer

in children three to seven years old, the brain accounts for over 60 percent of BMR, three times more than in adults. So much energy is channeled to the brain during these early critical years that it actually slows down growth in the rest of the body.

Humans are social foragers. We routinely bring home more than we need, with the intention of giving it away to our community. That means we have one another as a safety net; if someone comes home empty-handed, they won’t go hungry. This allows us to diversify and take risks, to develop complementary foraging strategies—hunting and gathering—that maximize the potential for big gains while limiting the consequences of failure.

We often discuss evolution in terms of physical traits, the appearance of new anatomical features or changes in their shape and size. After all, it’s the physical traits that are usually preserved in the fossil record. But behavioral changes are often the true instigators. New behaviors arise and the body adapts.

The world was already full of strange and wonderful humanlike species, their evolutionary cousins: Neanderthals in Europe, Denisovans in central Asia, relict populations of Homo erectus in Asia, an erectus-like species in southern Africa called Homo naledi, and a miniaturized species called Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the Hobbit by paleoanthropologists, in the islands of Indonesia. The modern science fiction fantasy of meeting some almost-human in a distant realm, communicating, living with them, played out again and again in Paleolithic wilderness.

Hungry? Tired? Still ten miles of hard walking from home? Of course you are! Do those look like lion prints to you? Yep! Wondering whether that growing abscess in your thigh will go away on its own or explode and go septic? Us, too! But what’s the use in worrying? It’ll probably be fine, and getting worked up won’t do you any good anyway. Hamna shida.

The Midwest 1 and 2 subjects were not an anomaly. All studies that try to achieve weight loss through exercise show the same pattern: the longer the study lasts, the less that weight loss meets expectations

The Biggest Loser is reality television for viewers who don’t want to choose between voyeurism and sadism.

More Data, Less Shouting

If you find yourself in a French hotel room injecting synthetic testosterone into your ass, that’s a definite sign to back it off a bit.

Modernization is pulling us indoors, out of the sun, and into the warm embrace of a computer screen—and the apelike lethargy is killing us.