Robert Jones — LessWrong

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Replying toOn not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas

On not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas

I've now done some more reading (including reading the 2012 paper more carefully).

What is surprising about the 2012 result (at least to me) is not that TEE (adjusted for FFM) is similar in different populations. That is consistent with other results, e.g. Westererp & Speakman (2008), which finds that TEE (which they call DEE) (a) has not changed significantly over time in Europe since the 1980s, (b) is not significantly different between populations in Europe/North America and those in the third world and (c) is not significantly different between modern humans and wild animals of the same size.

What makes the 2012 result surprising is that the PALs are different. For TEE to... (read 426 more words →)

Replying toOn not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas

Robert Jones3y*

On not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas

Thanks. I think I've fixed the links now.

While the Pontzer et al (2012) result is interesting, I don't read too much into it. For women, the difference in PAL is small (and strictly, not significant). The difference is larger for men (Hadza about 25% higher), but there are only 31 men in the sample. Probably more importantly, these populations will differ in many ways, which may affect their BMRs. It certainly doesn't shift my view from the meta-analysis I linked, and indeed the paper itself says, "It is important to note that this was not an intervention study; we examined habitual TEE, PAL, and body composition in hunter-gatherers and Westerners, but did... (read more)

Replying toOn not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas

Robert Jones3y*

On not getting contaminated by the wrong obesity ideas

I not believe that your brain has a lipostat: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.826334/full.

Aerobic exercise has no effect on resting metabolic rate, while resistance exercise increases it: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02640414.2020.1754716. The claim in the article you link (which even the article treats with a degree of skepticism) may be explained by the runners running more efficiently as the race progressed: it's certainly not plausible that the athletes' resting metabolic rates dropped by 1,300 kcal/day, and no such claim is made in the article linked in support of the claim by the first article (https://www.science.org/content/article/study-marathon-runners-reveals-hard-limit-human-endurance).

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