Are You Getting More Activity in a Day?

Herman Pontzer is an Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University. He studies how our species’ deep past shapes our health and physiology today.

He is the author of Burn: New Science Reveals How Metabolism Shapes Your Body, Health, and Longevity.

In his book, he follows the Hadza community — a group of people who live in Tanzania and are relatively untouched by the modern sedentary lifestyle. They are hunter gatherers and are about 7 times more active than the average American.

You would expect then, that they must be burning thousands of more calories than the typical desk jockey — but they don’t. In fact, on average, they burn the same number of calories as the average American — even when we adjust for height and weight.

So what’s going on?

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