Burn Quotes

“Organisms that spend their calories unwisely, in the eyes of natural selection, will reproduce less. The next generation will be full of offspring from the careful, strategic spenders—those who were best at acquiring energy, and who allocated those calories most effectively. Since physiology and behavioral tendencies are inherited, these offspring will tend to spend their calories like their parents did.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Our metabolic engines were not crafted by millions of years of evolution to guarantee a beach-ready bikini body, to keep us fit, or even necessarily to keep us healthy. Instead, our metabolism has been shaped by the Darwinian directive to survive and reproduce. Rather than keeping us trim (as the armchair engineer’s model of metabolism predicts), our faster metabolism has led to an evolved tendency to pack on more fat than any other ape.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“weight gain is fundamentally a problem of energy imbalance, of eating more food calories than you burn. The lesson that the Hadza and others teach us is we can’t do much to change the calories we burn. Daily energy expenditure is constrained, stuck within a narrow range that your body works hard to maintain. Obesity, then, is primarily a problem of overconsumption. And to fix that, we need to fix our food.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Holt’s work on satiety provides a solution to the Diet Wars, the terms of a truce for any warriors willing to listen. Diets that work, including both low-carb and low-fat varieties, are effective because they cut out low-satiety foods and help us feel full on fewer calories. Vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish can all be part of a healthy diet, as long as we avoid foods that prod us to overconsume”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Like the Tsimane, the Shuar have high rates of infection. Sam found that Shuar kids five to twelve years old have BMRs that are about 200 kcal per day higher than kids in the United States and Europe, a 20 percent difference. The energy demand of fighting infection steals calories away from growth. When our immune system responds to an infection, it makes a number of molecules (immunoglobulins, antibodies, and other proteins) that circulate in the blood—telltale signs of the battles fought against bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Sam found that Shuar kids with more of these markers in their blood grew slower than those who had fewer. The cost of immune response, in terms of both calories and growth, is probably one big reason that indigenous populations like the Shuar, Tsimane, and Hadza tend to be short-statured.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Our brains form, strengthen, and prune synapses throughout our lives (it’s happening in your brain right now as you form new memories from reading this book) but by far the most active period is in childhood, when we’re soaking up the world around us. Work by Christopher Kuzawa and colleagues has shown that 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.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Regardless of whether the low-carb diet led to somewhat elevated expenditures after weight loss, the results don’t do much to resuscitate the carbohydrate-insulin model. For one thing, weight loss was achieved through straightforward calorie reduction, not through carbohydrate restriction. And second, there’s no indication that the greater daily expenditures initially reported for the low-carb group made weight maintenance any easier.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“For one thing, as we see with the Hadza, daily energy expenditures are the same today in the industrialized world as they were in our hunter-gatherer past. Our bodies are incredibly adept at responding to changing activity levels to keep daily energy expenditures within a narrow window. But more crucially, blaming obesity on slow metabolism gets the cause and effect of weight change completely backward. Our metabolism doesn’t dictate energy balance, it responds to energy balance.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Nothing is innocent if eaten in excess. Any calories that aren’t burned, no matter if they come from starches, sugars, fats, or proteins, will wind up as extra tissue in your body.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Our metabolic engines shift and change to make room for increased activity costs, ultimately keeping daily energy expenditure within a narrow window. As a result, physically active people—whether it’s hunter-gatherers living today or in our collective past, or people in the industrialized world who exercise regularly—burn the same amount of energy as people who are much more sedentary.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“..incompetent people are so annoying: their very incompetence blinds them to how incompetent they are." (or as Darwin said, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge") - both of which explain this bafflingly ignorant quote by the author: "Thankfully, the American public is aware of this issue and elects only smart, fair leaders with proven competence in governing and expertise in world affairs." hahahaha, that's the most ridiculous thing I've read in ages.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay Healthy, and Lose Weight

“Among the Hadza, acute infections kill four out of ten children before their fifteenth birthday. The numbers are equally grim in other hunter-gatherer and subsistence farming societies. Parents in developed countries with the gall to withhold medicine and vaccines from their kids should talk to some Hadza moms.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Like sharks, we need to keep moving to survive.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“Every calorie of fat you carry is a calorie you ate and didn’t burn off.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“There’s a great quote of uncertain provenance, often attributed to Einstein, that “if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really understand it.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy

“The bottom line is that your daily activity level has almost no bearing on the number of calories you burn each day.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism

“Work by Christopher Kuzawa and colleagues has shown that in children three to seven years old,27 the brain accounts for over 60 percent of BMR, three times more than in adults.”
― Herman Pontzer, Burn: The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism