Burn: The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism

Well, I couldn't disagree more with those reviewers he felt the author was too cynical. I was with him, maybe I'm too cynical too, but when he got a bit exercised about he simplistic assumptions often made, I felt he had a point, and he always came over as a real person with a bit of a personality, which made me trust him more. I personally liked the no-bullshit approach, maybe some people find it a bit too informal and outspoken. Despite the more conversational asides, the author explains beautifully how life forms use energy all the way up from the basic principles. If you don't care about the biochemistry you can skip those bits.There is plenty of interesting information about the authors research (both the research findings and how they went about doing the research, which is often rather entertaining). There is also enough useable advice on how to best apply the findings in the service of keeping healthy - and losing weight if necessary. This advice is not overly detailed but that is because the author's conclusion on that question is that the detail doesn't really matter a lot - much as people have a seemingly insatiable appetite for ever more new miracle diets, the actionable advice is simple: eat a varied and ideally unprocessed diet, reduce calories if you want to lose weight, and exercise regularly in order to stay healthy and keep the weight off long-term.I really enjoyed the journey of reading this book as well as the debunking of over-sold trends like paleo and low-carb diets. And as a bonus, right at the end the author explains the bigger picture of energy use that I had never before appreciated: how use of energy underpins all life and how our lifestyles (back in prehistoric times, centuries ago and now) can all be quantified in terms of calories, and thus compared in a really simple way. It makes for a stark conclusion to the book.This is one of my two favourite reads this year and goes very well with the second one, The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman (author of Exercised, another good book), who happens to have been Pontzer's supervisor during his studies or PhD if I remember correctly.

Enjoyable and easy read except the part explaining the kleb cycle I came across this when doing a short course on nutrition and never really understood it and still dont. I get the concept and moved on. It is quite a long read and I did not get as much out of it as I would have liked. You only burn 50 kcals walking a mile, calculation of basic metabolic rate. Very interesting when explaining how your body has a limit on how many calories you burn no matter how much you exercise. Need to move more etc and wonderful references to the latest scientific studies from all over the world. Exercise is not effective when trying to lose weight but great for other things and also for keeping your weight off once you lose it. I originally ordered this book then cancelled it when I checked the index and there was no mention of alcohol which is 10% of my daily diet and much higher for friends and family. I am glad I changed my mind thought. I don't understand how he says a mans daily calorie intake is 2,500 -3000. I did a food diary for 1 year and mine was just under 2000 a day to maintain my weight.

This book totally blows up my preconception that, if you exercise more, you can eat more!It’s extremely engagingly written. The only exception is a chapter on the details of the pathways for metabolising each kind of nutrient. I found that very dense. But that does not detract from the extreme readability of the book as a whole. Recommended.

It's engagingly written with facts and stories and some unexpected findings which were only determined by being able to actually properly measure human metabolic activity over a sustained period. I always puzzled a bit when reading all the usual dietary and fitness articles as to how your body knew whether it should store or burn fat at any point as it wouldn't know whether you were going to eat or exercise later.This explains that it's not the simple base rate plus exercise that many other sources quote but a complicated web of interconnecting factors where your body does its damndest to stop you burning too much or eating too little and in many ways the choice of diet doesn't matter (for weight loss that is, nutrition is another matter). The findings of why the hunter gatherers were lean flew in the face of the usual logic.I've read it twice already.

This book gripped me from the start. OK, so I am a scientist, albeit I worked on plants, and this helped me with following the biochemistry described in parts of the book. Over the years I put on quite a bit of weight, but over the past two and a half years I lost 4 stone, mostly through cutting down on my calorie intake in a way I knew I could sustain in the long term. Reading this book has helped me understand why simply cutting down the calories allowed me to lose weight, when years of strenuous exercise did virtually nothing for my weight loss. This book is well worth reading: it is very well written, easy to follow, and is a real eye opener. And it makes sense. I encourage anyone wanting to lose weight, and even if you simply want to understand more about how the human body controls our metabolism and weight, to read this book.

Excelente libro para entender cómo funciona el metabolismo energético del Homo sapiens.

The Hadza are extremely impressive - and hunter/gatherers that certainly don't come across as low carb. But they are just one tribe - and thus certainly don't prove all of humanity's ancestors ate like this.And the low carb Universe's leading voices Steve Phinney and Jeff Volek emphasize: low carb is not necessary (or even advisable) for all of us.Certainly, though, for those with "Expanding Waistline/Lose Weight & Keep it Off.....Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes/Save Life & Limb" = Thrive on Low Carb Diet", see the graph below (from p vii of "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living" by Jeff S. Volek, PhD, RD and Stephen D. Phinney, MD, PHD).Please, Herman Pontzer, correct this - the quotation of Steve Phinney is wrong. And Volek/Phinney mention the Massai and the Inuit merely as examples of traditional low carb lifestyles - they do not say everyone has eaten/should eat like this.

Already recommended it to the kidsThe book explains clearly where our civilization is falling short and where we should be heading

O livro do Professor Herman Pontzer mudou o meu pensamento a respeito do nosso metabolismo. Pelo menos para mim, ter acesso à informação que há um limite para o nosso gasto energético diário e que a atividade não aumenta esse gasto foi esclarecedor. Ademais, ainda que a atividade física não contribua diretamente para a redução de peso, a explicação do Professor Pontzer a respeito de como ela reduz os processo inflamatórios no corpo foi fantástica. É um daqueles livros que tendem a mudar nossa percepação a respeito da realidade.

Have you ever slept just a few hundred yards from a pride of hungry lions to gather data, with just a thin nylon tent between you and becoming breakfast? Herman Pontzer has. In "Burn", he lives to tell the tale of trying to keep up with bafflingly badass Hadza hunter-gatherers and steel-livered Georgian paleoanthropololgists. The result is a masterwork of popular science writing: authoritative yet accessible, iconoclastic, and funny as hell.The book is primarily about energy: the evolution of how humans acquire, use, and store it; the mechanisms for turning energy into work; how other animals do it differently; and how we sometimes thoughtlessly squander it. In the process, he upends some popular myths about diet and exercise.For example, his research shows that the Hadza, who every day move around for ~4 hours and 15,000 steps, use the same amount of energy as couch-potato North Americans. What?!? How is this even possible? I'm still wrapping my head around this, but the definitive double-labeled water experiments don't lie. Humans have "constrained energy expenditure", meaning that you only burn so many calories a day no matter what you do. Our extremely effective "metabolic compensation" simply shifts calories around so we break even at the end of the day no matter how much we move.For practical purposes, this means that you basically can't lose weight through exercise. Reducing caloric intake is the only way. Nevertheless, the manifold health benefits of exercise still make it the single most healthful activity we can do, as Prof Pontzer takes pains to emphasize.I appreciate Pontzer's vivid prose with evocative imagery and analogies that even a 10-year old can understand. I have no idea how he summarized all of college biochemistry in 2 pages while still making sense, but I'm sure glad he did. I particularly laud his deft use of technical terms like "hooey", "BS" and "poo", sometimes when dispatching bad science and fad diets like Paleo, low-carb keto, and raw foodism into the rubbish bin of nonsense. He's the anthropologist who's actually gathering the data in the African bush, freezing urine samples in liquid nitrogen and hauling them back. Don't know about you, but I'm going to listen to working scientists with real data before armchair engineers, journalists, and self-styled diet gurus.Finally, it's been a while since I laughed out loud multiple times reading a science book. The gleefully irreverent humor lives in the hangover poetry, the punny section titles ("Mitochondria and the O2 joy", "It's alimentary, my dear Watson"), and the Hadza language lessons.Out there, there's a lot of contradictory information on diet, exercise, and metabolism. For literate primates who use energy and want to disentangle truth from speculation without having to confront hungry lions, Prof Pontzer has done us a great service in compiling all we need to know in one enjoyably informative package. Read "Burn" to learn how your body really works.-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Chief Happiness Engineer and author of  The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible , the highest-rated dating book on Amazon, and  Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in MedicineThe Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely IrresistibleShould I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine