The Wellness Scoop - Metabolism and Calories; Myths and Reality

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

What actually is your metabolism; what’s the link between metabolism, your weight and calorie intake; can any foods, powders or supplements speed it up and does yo-yo dieting or restrictive eating have a negative impact? Today evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer talks fact and fiction and why so many of the headlines are mis-selling us information when it comes to our metabolism, calories, our health and weight management.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Ella Mills, and my husband and business partner, Matthew Mills. Hi, everyone. Our podcast, Delicious Ways podcast with me, Ella Mills, and my husband and business partner, Matthew Mills. Hi, everyone. Our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better, is a weekly show focused on everything that matters to us at Deliciously Ella. We believe that feeling good is a holistic 360 degree approach to our lifestyles and that wellness is about so much more than just what we eat or how we exercise.

It's also about our relationships, our mindset, our sleep patterns, our stress levels and how we look after ourselves on a day-to-day basis. On this podcast we'll be breaking down all of these topics looking at absolutely everything that impacts our mental and our physical health and sharing the small simple changes that will hopefully inspire you to feel better. Thanks so much for your questions again this week and for all the amazing feedback on the Trussell Trust partnership that we announced last week. We are really so proud of it. We're so excited about it and we just really appreciate all the feedback that's come through. As always, any feedback, any episode requests, any questions, please do get in touch. Podcast at DeliciouslyElla.com. So the first question that we have today is about other podcasts. And I know lots of our listeners are always looking for other things to listen to.

I absolutely love podcasts. I listen to them either if I'm trying to go for a walk to get a baby to go to sleep. And also when I'm cooking, I just find it's a really nice way of unwinding and switching off. So there's two that I've been listening to recently. The first one is the Jordan Harbinger show. I'm not sure if anyone's come across it before. But for any of our listeners that really enjoy the breadth of topics that we cover on our show,

I think you're going to absolutely love this podcast because it touches on so many really brilliant topics. They've got weekly interviews with brilliant guests and they've pulled together like genuinely very useful, very practical insights on pretty much every aspect of your life, from your work to your relationships. And it all just focused on transforming your thinking, which really resonates with me as that's everything that we try and do two particular recommendations I absolutely loved his interview with Russell

Brand on releasing ourselves from addiction and there's also an episode with the actor Matthew McConaughey and that is so brilliant as well and then my second recommendation for people who are looking for podcast recommendations I think this is the one you really need which is the podcast Cast Away with Laura Whitmore and it's basically the podcast for podcast recommendations Laura interviews celebrity guests every week to find out what they're listening to and through that she uncovers basically all of the best podcasts out there so you'll get recommendations on everything from mental health to comedy love crime and fictional series. Both the Jordan Harbinger Show and Cast Away are available on all normal podcast platforms, Apple, Spotify,

wherever you listen. And I'll put both names in the show notes below if that's helpful. It is the most beautiful, glorious day here. There's a kind of sense of spring and optimism in the air. So I had to pick this question today because I'm going on that theme of optimism, which is what are you most looking forward to when lockdown starts to end? Gosh, playing golf again. I'm an absolute avid golfer. I play every weekend. It's my moment of real headspace. Ella Blesser gives me the green ticket to go out and play every Saturday morning and I absolutely love it. I have time with friends and time to be in fresh air and just completely clear my mind. So definitely golf and counting down the days until March the 29th when we're allowed to play again.

Every time it's a sunny day, he looks outside and says, I can't believe I'm not playing golf today. It's so beautiful. But we have appreciated the Saturday mornings with him and I have appreciated the second parent role a lot with the two tiny ones at the moment. I have to say parenting and working at home, as obviously so many of you guys would have found this year has definitely been intense. There have been so many upsides to it because we've had this unbelievable amount of extra time with the girls and we've really got to be such a huge part of their day to day and watch them grow up. And we saw Sky learn to crawl during lockdown, learn to start talking, learn to walk. Also having another tiny one and May still breastfeeds a lot. Trying to juggle that with working at home when you can always, always hear them and you're always wanting

to give them that attention. I'm sure like so many other parents, you feel so kind of torn between the two. So I am really quite looking forward to just being able to go back to the office and see all our colleagues, but be able to kind of get a bit more divide again between work and home. I am really, really excited about that and excited for a date to go out for dinner together, just the two of us and try to not talk about work. But that inevitably is quite difficult when you have your lives quite so intertwined. But I am very excited about that. And on that subject, the last question for this week is how are we getting on with our plans for our cafe restaurant yeah we're getting along really well we've been trying to time the works alongside when we know that hospitality will be able to open again in the UK and so we've got a firm date now of May the 17th

that hospitality will be opening so we're going to start the works hopefully in about two weeks time. And so the works will be finished by the end of April. And then we'll have a bit of time to really bed in the site and do some final training with our new team, which we'll be hiring for and then finally opening. So we're incredibly excited about it. It really is. We say it's a lot in Delicious Yellow. We're so fortunate to do the things that we do and have the experiences that we have. But opening a restaurant really has always been a dream of ours. And we think it's the absolute epicenter of what I hope people who follow our brand and care about what we do want to come and experience. And so we're just incredibly excited to get it open. Yeah, the menu is looking so, so good. There

are some just very exciting things on there like mushrooms, scallops and cauliflower schnitzel and our own mac and cheese, which I'm particularly excited about. I know I say it myself about our own food, but it really is going to be delicious. And yeah, as you said, it's been a real dream of ours and it's going to just be so nice to be able to welcome people in and create a sense of community in real life again. It's been incredible to be able to keep doing it online, but it's not quite the same, I think, for so many of us. So I cannot wait, literally counting down the days to that. But in the meantime, there is so much to get stuck into in the podcast. And today's episode actually is one of the ones I've most enjoyed researching for. This book,

I've got so stuck into it. It's quite meaty, but I think it touches on, I guess, one of the biggest buzzwords within the health space, which is metabolism. And I don't know how many magazine articles or newspaper headlines we've all seen saying how to boost your metabolism and so many celebrity interviews saying, oh, I look this way because I have a fast metabolism. And I think it's just one of those buzzwords that I think is overused and probably quite often not necessarily totally understood. And so today's guest is an evolutionary biologist called Herman Ponser. And Herman has been studying metabolism, has some really interesting, really quite groundbreaking theories from his recent research with an incredible tribe in Tanzania, looking at really

how our metabolism works and what that means for the way that we talk about health and wellness and some of the health issues that we have in the world today. So welcome, Herman. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Thanks, guys. Your book says it's, you've talked about burn, the misunderstood science of metabolism. And I'd love to just start right there with the basics. What actually is our metabolism? Because as you say, and I'm sure any of our listeners will agree with, metabolism feels like a buzzword. It's something that you see in headlines time and time again. But I think for a lot of people, they don't necessarily understand what

it's actually referring to. So I wondered if we could start with the basics. Yeah. So metabolism is all the work that your cells are doing all the time, right? You've got 37 trillion cells in your body, and they're all busy doing something. And most of it's, you know, stuff that we're not really aware of. So digesting your food and keeping your immune system kicking and making your brain work and all these things that we're only kind of dimly aware of, if at all. And all of that work, that essential work that your body's doing all the time takes energy. And the energy that it takes is we call it your metabolic rate. So when somebody like me, who's a physiologist or an evolutionary biologist thinks about metabolism,

we're thinking about everything, right? We're thinking about all the work that your body's doing all the time. That's just central to life, to who you are, all those sort of normal stuff that you think of day to day, not just sort of diet and exercise. For us, it's everything. Yeah, it's very interesting you say that because as you say, I think so often you think of metabolism and you think it's solely related maybe to digestion because it's so often portrayed as though it's basically solely related to weight loss. Yeah, right. Yeah. And so people talk about calories and they get upset because, you know, it's hard to keep track of calories and it's just calories and calories out. Is that a sensible way to think about things? And what know the energy impact of this food or that food and so

you can really quickly get lost in the weeds on this stuff and it can be complex you know your body's this evolved you know sophisticated machine and so it's easy to get lost in the weeds and so the the idea behind the book was to sort of try to demystify all that and and lay out in a sort of more simple way all the ways that our bodies spend energy and how it all works together. And one of the things that we really enjoyed when we were reading the book is how many myths you really debunk in there. And we were really astounded by some of the statistics that you show in there. What were some of the main myths that you think are completely misconceived by people? Yeah, well, I mean, I think the biggest one for

me, if I had to point to one finding for my research life that really prompted me to write this book, it's this really surprising result we got. So I'm an anthropologist by training, and I've spent a lot of my career working with hunter gatherer groups and other people around the globe trying to understand how different lifestyles affect energy expenditure. And not necessarily from a diet and exercise point of view, but just from a whole life point of view, like I said, you know, because our energy is everywhere. So I went and worked with a group called the Hadza in northern Tanzania, this hunter-gatherer group. And they're really physically active, of course. You can imagine it takes a lot of work to get

your food from the wild landscape around you. And they are incredibly physically active. And yet, they burn the same number of calories as you and me, right here in the industrialized sedentary world. And that was a mind blowing result. And I think it underscores something that people really misunderstand about metabolism, which is that, you know, we think it's easy to move your metabolism around that if you exercise a bit more, you can burn off a few more calories and get ready for summer and your beach-ready body and all that kind of stuff. It's actually really hard

to move your metabolism around with exercise. And so I think that's one of the biggest myths that we might try to get away from is this idea that we can just sort of step on the gas and rev our engines more to increase our energy expenditure every day. So just to kind of clarify that, because I think it is so different to what so many people believe, you know, so obviously, if you went to the gym

today, and you went on a treadmill or on a spin bike or something, and it said you have burnt 250 calories, what does that really mean? As far as you understand it, because I think for a lot of people, that would mean okay, I've effectively got a 250 calorie deficiency in my diet. So I will either lose weight or I could eat 250 more calories. But what you're saying is it doesn't mean what we think it means. That's right. So take your example, and you burn 250 calories in exercise today. That much is accurate, right? Probably that much is a fair estimate of how many calories you burned in exercise. But if you look at your Fitbit or your smartwatch, and you try to figure out how many calories you burned over the course of the whole day, where you get into trouble is trying to add that 250 calories onto what it estimates your basal metabolic rate to be,

onto what it estimates your other activity costs are going to be. And the sort of add-it-all-up kind of approach to total energy expenditure kind of falls apart. And it falls apart because the energy that you spend on exercise kind of gets taken away from energy expenditure on other tasks. Now, that doesn't happen right away. So if you go start a new exercise program tomorrow, then yeah, for a few, you know, maybe even a few weeks, you'll burn a few more extra calories than you were before because your body takes time to adjust. And day to day, it can fluctuate. So if you exercise a lot today and you don't tomorrow, then yeah, you'll burn a bit more today than tomorrow. But what we're finding is your body's really clever at adjusting to sort of long-term

changes in lifestyle so that the more active you are, your body suppresses energy expenditure on other stuff, immune function, for example, inflammation, that kind of thing, and kind of makes room for your new active lifestyle. And so you're not burning any more calories than you were before you started your exercise program after your body adjusts. That's very interesting. So the treadmill will tell you that you are, but in reality, the entirety of your day and of all the energy that every single one of your cells is using is actually exactly the same. And as far as I'm aware, that's what you were saying in your book, that exactly that, that you were studying this tribe who was so active, and yet they were burning the same number of calories across the day that someone who's just sitting at their computer and

barely walking. Yeah, yeah. It was a total surprise. I mean, because I went into that study, I think, with the same mindset that most other people have, which is that we'd see really high expenditures, right? I mean, that's what we knew we'd find. And of course, that's not what we found at all. They're, you know, they're getting that men get something like 19,000 steps a day, on average, women get like 13,000 steps a day to give you some context, and the same number of calories every day, as as you and me. And so what is what does that mean? I mean, one of the things you refer to in there,

well, I think there's two bits actually, sorry, I'd like to pick up. There's a study you mentioned, which I thought was very interesting, which is that if you therefore started a new exercise regime today, two years from now, the study estimated that you'd weigh effectively

the exact same that you did today. So it's not effective for weight loss. And then I guess that taps into the second part of the question that I wanted to go into, which you talk very much about how this relates to the current obesity crisis, and that it very much points to the fact that exercise is not the sole answer. The work that we did with the Hadza and other groups too, I should say, it's not just the Hadza, we found the same result other places. It's, you know, it was one of those great scientific kind of aha moments that unlocks and kind of makes sense of a lot of other research, right? So for decades, we've known that exercise is kind of a poor tool

for weight loss. Like you say, after a couple of years of a new exercise program, your weight's most likely going to be basically where it was when you started, right? Your body's going to adjust. And so those results kind of help explain how your body adjusts. Your metabolic rate actually changes and the way your body spends calories changes to adjust. And of course, that has, you know, that's directly related to how we think about obesity, right? Because if you look at the National Health Services, you know, fact sheet on obesity or WHO or CDC, they'll all tell you if you want to cure obesity, then you have to watch your diet. They usually say that, but you also have to exercise. And what these results say is, you

should exercise anyway. It's really important, but the metabolic effects that you think you're getting aren't going to be there. You're not going to lose weight with exercise. It is so interesting. But one of the things that you then did look at, which again, I was absolutely fascinated, was a study on The Biggest Loser Show and about how they were able, possibly in a negative way, to fundamentally for the more long-term alter their metabolic rate, which I guess tapped into the whole conversation about metabolism and yo-yo dieting and extreme weight loss and that that actually can alter your metabolism, but not in the way that you would want it to. Yeah, right. So again, you know, I think the

evolutionary perspective is really important here, you know, for a half a billion years of vertebrate evolution, you know, losing weight has been a really bad sign. We have a long evolutionary history of not wanting to lose weight. And so we have all these adaptations in our metabolism, everything else that help us actually make it really hard to lose weight. And we saw some of that with the HODs at work and the metabolic changes there to exercise. But you also see it when you try to crash diet and hugely calorie restrict, like they did with Biggest Loser Study. And those folks, their metabolic rates plummeted you know and why well because again as you starve yourself your body is signaling there's all sorts of signals that say we're starving we're in

trouble right and your body responds by putting on the brakes in your metabolic rate and trying to sort of arrest that change in your in body weight and so it makes it really hard to change. People know this, right? It's really hard to change your weight. And it's because your body is very cleverly trying to stop you from changing your weight. And so what is the most effective way then? Well, the short answer is it's hard. And anybody who tells you there's some easy silver bullet way is selling you something. And so one of the things I wanted to do with this book is not, I've got no diet to sell and no exercise program to sell. I just want to talk about the science

and get people to understand how their bodies work. Ways that seem to work the best are to find a diet for you that makes you feel full on fewer calories. And so there are some really straightforward principles to begin exploring that for yourself, what diet works for you. Higher protein diets seem to make people feel fuller on less. Higher fiber tends to make people feel full on less. But I mean, this is a question for you guys, right? I mean, you guys

are the food experts. So what do you find that people are able to sort of maintain healthy weights on, but at the same time, you know, feeling like they're really satisfied with the food they're eating? So we've published over over 2000 recipes and we purposely don't publish what the calories are. And everyone always says to us, give us calories, tell us what the calories are. And on our food products by law, we have to put them on there, but on any other recipes we don't, we think food is about its goodness and its nutritional density. And so everything that we publish is just about great, delicious plantbased food at least that's the that's the intention anyway so calorie counting is not a specific purpose of what we what we do and i think in reading your book we were we were

happy about that yeah you speak a lot about calories in in the book and about it seems a very interesting debate about their effectiveness and whether or not they are potentially kind of semi-arbitrary. As you say, they're very hard to keep count of. I think the fact that actually one calorie is actually 100,000 calories really, and there's just this mislabeling of it, I think is potentially quite indicative of the confusion around the topic as a whole. I felt the fact that we were technically referring to the wrong thing. Yeah, kilocalories. Yeah, right. Like you say, there's all those processes where you take your food and actually are able to use it. I don't know in the UK if it's like this. In the US,

we're all told that we eat a 2,000 calorie diet, which is about, you know, for women is about maybe 10 to 20% low and for men's about 50% lower than you actually eat. So right there, you're in trouble. Did you say a nine-year-old eats about 2,000 calories a day? That's right. Yeah. I mean, on average, that's right. There's also a lot of variability person to person.

But if you're an adult eating a 2,000-calorie diet, really eating a 2,000-calorie diet, you are in the slim minority of folks who have metabolic rates that low. But calories are so hard. People are terrible at tracking what they eat. We know this. If you ask people what they eat, you have them keep diaries, very careful diaries. And then against that, you measure how many calories they're actually eating. We can do that accurately.

People miss about 30% of their calories that they're eating, right? Huge underreporting. It's like missing a whole meal. And you're also really bad about tracking that they're eating, right? Huge underreporting. It's like missing a whole meal. And you're also really bad about tracking energy you spend, right, for the reasons that you were talking about. Your Fitbit tells you one thing, but that's a guess. It's a complete guess, and it's a guess based on activity, which is even sort of worse because activity isn't a really good indicator.

And so I can understand why you wouldn't want to publish calorie counts in your meals, because it's misleading to think that you can actually keep track of it in a way, right? I mean, I used to live in New York, and they published it was by law. You went to a restaurant, it had to tell you how many calories are in each of the dishes. And I don't think it had any effect at all, because people do such a bad job, not intentionally, of course, but it's just so hard to keep track of your calories that it's not very useful information. And I think people get really frustrated, too, and think, oh, then calories don't matter, right? And I think that's sort of, as a physiologist, that's a frustration for us because, of course, calories do matter, but good luck trying to keep track of them if you don't have the tools of a laboratory at your disposal. Stop sitting on your Aeroplan points and get big savings so you can be somewhere you actually want to be, like on a beach.

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with Libsyn ads. Email bob at Libsyn.com to learn more. That's b o b at l i b s y n.com. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I found very interesting as well as I think, when you're talking about the metabolism, as you said, you're talking about the body as a whole. And I think for me, at least the way you talked about it, and about these 37 trillion cells, and the fact that it's taken over 2 billion years for us to become these kind of multi complex organisms that organisms that we are today and all of the different processes that have to take place for for example calorie to become you know one molecule of ATP that you can actually then use as energy in your body it gives such appreciation of the fact that we're sitting here we're having this conversation and while we're doing that there is

just this unbelievable buzz of activity happening in every tiny, tiny drop of all of our bodies and every person we can see out the window and everyone within this vicinity. And it's interesting, we just go about our daily lives and we're so far removed from the appreciation of that. I know that's one of my biggest passions. I'm a real nerd for this sort of thing. I find it so fascinating because I think it's just, it's so easy to take it all for granted. And I found the way you spoke about it really made me check in and appreciate that. And I think what's interesting is, again, I think so often, and I know you said, like, we can be kind of very oversimplistic with the way that we talk about things like energy, metabolism, calories. And actually, there's so much of our bodies that need this energy and

require this energy in order to do what they do. And you say the brain and the liver are the two, the organs that are using the most amount of energy. And the brain weighs less than three pounds, but it burns over 300 calories, for example, a day. And that learning is more expensive in terms of calorie expenditure than thinking. And I wondered if you could tell us a bit about that, because I thought that was really fascinating. Oh, that's one of the most exciting things to come out of the world of human metabolism in the last few years, I think, is people using PET scans to track energy use by the brain. And we used to think that an ounce of brain

had a certain number of calories that burned, and the bigger your brain got as you grew, the more energy it burned. It was just a one-to-one relationship there. And what we've learned, and this is super exciting research, is that actually when you're about five years old, you know, you're a human sponge for information. You're learning all about your world and you're interacting with it in a way that you couldn't before because you're finally old enough to do it. And it's finally old enough to make sense to you. And all these connections are being made, your brain is sort of this white hot sea of metabolism going on as you're making connections and breaking up ones you're not using. And it's just a really exciting time in your brain and it burns lots and lots of calories. And we could see that kind of dynamic stuff happening in the rest

of our bodies as well throughout our lives. Your liver is more active after you've eaten a meal or when it's really processing nutrients a lot, it's going to be more active. You know, your gut burns twice as many calories after you've eaten than it does when you're fasted. And your immune system can get cranked up and then come back down depending on the pathogen burden and all that kind of stuff. So again, like all the stuff that we don't see and we kind of ignore is actually a lot of the drama that's happening in your body in terms of the metabolism. And presumably as well, that taps into what we mentioned earlier with yo-yo dieting as well and under eating, because again, all of these processes desperately need energy and we're

going to create that most easily from the food that we consume. Yeah, of course, of course. And it's also, so, you know, diet affects how many calories you've got to burn on all these processes. Exercise, I just want to make sure, you know, I don't want anybody here listening to this think that the exercise doesn't matter because, of course, it is fundamentally important to health. But one of the reasons it's so important is that it changes the way that you spend your calories, right? So you spend more on exercise than you spend a bit less on things like inflammation. You spend a little bit less on things like stress-free activity, right? And so we know that exercise is so good for us for all these reasons.

And this kind of energy juggling effect is one of the big reasons. It's so interesting to say, because it gives you such appreciation for everything that's going on. And it gives you such appreciation then when you're eating a meal and to think about the fact that actually that then powers up all these processes that we so often forget are even happening. We probably don't even think about it in any given week necessarily for so many people. And I think, again, there's a few kind of myths that you touch on. And I thought one of them was quite interesting because think, again, there's a few kind of myths that you touch on. And I thought one of them was quite interesting, because again, I guess it's a classic kind of headline clickbait

topic, which is like, you know, how to burn more calories, or like how to burn off this meal, or like, can you burn off this donut? And as you said, you actually exhale as carbon dioxide, the meal to some extent. And I wondered if you could touch on that. And again, give our listeners a little bit more of an understanding. What is actually happening when we take that in, in order to make the body work? Yeah. So, you know, everything you eat that you get nutrients from is carbon-based. So long molecules, hundreds of molecules long, all a lot of carbon and oxygen bound together. And that's whether it's sugars or fats or whatever, proteins as well. And so you eat all this food, and the fats that you eat get broken down into fatty acids. All the carbs and sugars that you

eat all get broken down into sugars, right? Which is why a potato and honey, for example, are going to get broken into the same kind of mix of simple sugars in your blood. And then those fats and sugars sort of get mixed through your bloodstream and pulled into cells to make energy. And how does that work? Well, let's take a sugar molecule, for example, which glucose is your typical sugar molecule that your body uses. All the starches that you eat, for example, get broken down eventually into glucose molecules. So a glucose molecule gets pulled into your cell and what your cell starts doing inside the cells, you start sort of ripping it apart.

And as you rip apart this glucose molecule and chop it up, and a lot of this happens in your mitochondria, if you've heard of the mitochondria, that a lot of this chopping up is happening there. Every time you pull it apart, it's like pulling apart Lego or something like that, right? It's like pulling apart Tinker Toys

and you hear that snap, right? Well, that snap is used, your body harnesses that energy that gets released from pulling apart the molecule to charge up these rechargeable batteries that we all run on called ATP. So ATP is that it's not a molecule that gets burned up like petrol or something like that. It's a rechargeable battery that goes from ADP to ATP in the charged state. Where does it get the energy to charge from? Well, from popping those carbon molecules off the molecules that you eat. Well, then what happens with all those carbon molecules that you've pulled off? Well, you've got to get rid of the carbon.

And actually, the way that you get rid of it is you breathe it out. So all the carbon dioxide that you breathe out, the carbons in that air, are from those molecules that you breathe out, the carbons in that air are from those molecules that you pulled apart. And you don't sort of turn that carbon somehow directly into energy. It's actually the energy is from popping the molecules apart. That's how you charge your ATP. And so, you know, and then you breathe out the carbon dioxide. That's a very short course on metabolism 101 on how that works. But as you say, you know, a lot of people don't understand that, that actually you're exhaling your food. And I wondered, again, coming back just to the word

metabolism, you know, when you read, for example, this will speed up your metabolism, say, you know, 10 foods that boost your metabolism. Is that all just totally incorrect? Yeah. Short answer, yes. So I have some coffee in here. Coffee will boost your metabolism a little bit. I mean, your body will adjust and get used to it and you won't actually see it, you know. But aside from that kind of thing, you know, I saw a headline on a magazine in the store a few months ago, metabolic boosting water that would boost your metabolism 70%. I mean, it's just complete silliness, right? But I think it speaks to how little people have been taught about the metabolisms that you, that sounds possible, right? Maybe this can work. I don't know. You know, maybe ginger will increase my metabolism, but, and I love ginger, but it's not going to change your metabolism, right? I mean, you're a much more robust system than that. So yeah, all of those metabolism boosting things are either completely bunk or, I mean,

there are drugs that will boost your metabolism and they're incredibly dangerous because if you start messing with how your mitochondria work, you can really do damage. So there's a small number of drugs that are controlled and you shouldn't be on anyhow that will actually affect your metabolism. And the over-the-counter food stuff, you know, supplement stuff is all just hype. Yeah. So every powder and shake that you see on a shelf that tells you it will boost your metabolism. Yeah. That is just nonsense. It's just silliness, yeah. Yeah, and also again, and I guess just,

I know we touched on it at the beginning, but just to reiterate, your metabolism is everything that's happening in your body. So you don't want to boost that anyway. It's not like you can boost your metabolism and lose 10 pounds overnight. No, no, that's right. Think about what your body is really built for.

It's evolved for, you know, it's evolved to survive and reproduce. Now we don't have to use it that way. We have a choice. We can do whatever we like with our bodies. But that's what your body is built built for. It's evolved for. It's evolved to survive and reproduce. Now, we don't have to use it that way. We have a choice. We can do whatever we like with our bodies. But that's what your body is built to do. And so it's actually a really kind of robust system. It can take the daily changes in diet and activity level, and it kind of evens it all out to make you a functioning human. And so the idea that we can kind of change one thing, change one diet piece, and it's going to have these huge repercussions. It's just not how it works, right? We're a much more robust system than that. And so when you say you read an interview, and someone was, you know,

the celebrity, and they'll say, Oh, no, I look this way, because they have a fast metabolism, I can, can you have a fast metabolism? Does that account for people's different body shapes? You can have a fast metabolism. So just like people have different heights, right? You know, there's sort of an average human height, but there's also lots of variation. There's an average human metabolism, and there's variation around that. But this is where it gets interesting. We've actually known since the 80s that if you look at people who have obesity versus people who are able to stay slim, one of the early ideas that got tested when we finally were able to measure energy expenditures outside of the laboratory, and that's another kind of important piece here, is the technology, the methods to measure energy expenditures in normal daily life are not that old, actually, which is why a lot of the stuff seems kind of new because a lot of the science is new. But when we were finally able to measure energy expenditures, total calories burned outside the lab, one of the first things people raced to do was to test this idea that everybody was sure was right, that people who had obesity would have a slow metabolism.

And it turns out, completely not true at all. People who have obesity have the same metabolic rates for their size as people who are slim. And in fact, if you don't correct for size, because people who are bigger and carry more cells, well, they have higher metabolic rates because there's more cells doing more work. If you don't correct for size, then people with obesity actually have higher metabolic rates. They burn more calories a day than people who are slim, just by virtue of the fact that people with obesity tend to be bigger. But if you account for size, right, the fact that bigger people burn more calories just by being bigger, and you're correct for that, you'd find that people with obesity have the same energy expenditures as people who are slim. And so while it's true that people vary in how many calories they burn each day, even after you correct for size and all that kind of stuff, that variation doesn't tell us about who's likely to get overweight and who's likely to stay

slim. It doesn't tell us that at all. And instead, it seems to be how well your sort of brain wiring fits your food environment, right? So the experiences you had growing up with food and the particular genes that you have that help wire your brain's reward systems for food and how quickly you feel like you're full. Those are the sort of a brain-centered view of obesity that that's what really affects if you tend to eat a bit too much or tend to be able to maintain weight without any trouble. Fascinating. Yeah, it really is. It's just, it's so much to condense into such a kind of short period of time but i think it's a brilliant overview and i think to me just highlights the appreciation

of our bodies and everything that they're doing and the need to kind of eat real food in order to fuel them properly versus all these weird and wacky kind of magic pills and answers, which ultimately aren't doing our bodies any good because our bodies are so much more than their kind of physical attributes. It's everything that's actually going on internally. Yes, that's right. I think that's where this public health disaster, which is the obesity crisis, you know, this is where it's going to be won and lost, right? Can we find foods that people feel nourished on and feel happy with and feel content with that help them stay at a healthy weight? And I don't know, I hope so. I'm sure we can, but that's where the battle will be. I think it helps. We have to move away from this idea that there is a quick fix and there is just so much sensationalism and so much of it does stem

from words like metabolism or words like calories and this idea that there's a magic answer and you can put this powder in your water and it'll totally transform your metabolism and there's a lot of money to be made from it too there is and that is the sad reality and so i know for me and then for us as a company debunkinging and, you know, these myths by conversations solely aesthetics. But Herman, if there was a couple of things you'd like to leave our listeners with, I guess, a quick snapshot of something they could tell their friends or colleagues or something that you wish everyone knew that would change the way that we thought about this field. I wondered if you could sum up with sharing that with us. Sure. First of all, I'd say, you know, metabolism

isn't simple because it's evolved and not engineered. You're not a simple machine. And the take home is in day-to-day life, diet and exercise are two different tools for two different jobs. That it turns out your diet is going to be more important for managing your weight. Exercise is more important for everything else, all the other aspects of your health. And so you can't run enough to earn that donut. It doesn't work that way, right? You can't trade exercise for diet or vice versa. And in terms of diet, you know, getting away from super processed foods and getting towards, you know, whole foods that are real. I think that's an important piece of it too. But yeah, I think the diet and exercise thing is really how those sort of work with each other and can't be traded off. I think that's a important piece of it too. But yeah, I think the diet and exercise thing is really how those sort of work with each other

and can't be traded off. I think that's a big piece. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Herman. We so appreciate it. I will put the details for the book, Burn, The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism in the show notes below.

I really, really recommend it for anyone who's interested in this topic. It's incredibly insightful. Actually, there was one point that never came up with anything we talked about today, but that I just really liked and I thought might be a nice ending, actually, even though it's on a slight tangent, was that you said that no matter what the size we are, we all effectively have one billion heartbeats in our lifetime, whether we're the tiniest shrew or the mightiest whale. I just thought that was fascinating.

Isn't that amazing the way it all works out? Yeah. I mean, metabolism really is just at the core of who you are, you know? And, you know, like you say, you get about a billion heartbeats in this life. We all do and use them wisely. Quite right. Well, thank you Herman so much for coming on today. We so appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It was really fun. Thanks so much again for listening, everyone. Please do share the episodes, rate it, review it if it was helpful. And we will be back again next week in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.