A science book that was entertaining! And I learned new things in almost every chapter, even though I read about this subject all the time. Well done!

A fun, authoritative & witty guide to the latest science of metabolism, exercise & weight loss
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., Happiness Engineer and author of [b: The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible|33977456|The Tao of Dating The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible|Ali Binazir|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1485248157l/33977456._SY75_.jpg|13580088], the highest-rated dating book on Amazon, and [b: Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine|34099644|Should I Go to Medical School An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine|Ali Binazir|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1486004834l/34099644._SY75_.jpg|55119946]

Almost didn’t venture into this one by judging the book by its cover as I thought that this was going to lean in the direction of being some type of diet book, so the plan was to briefly skim and not review. However, this was just so interesting with regard to body metabolism and how we ‘burn’ calories that it turned into a super engaging read. There’s also quite a bit of paleoanthropology and anthropological field work to boot. The background on BMR and fitness is quite eye opening, and perhaps my favorite part is hearing a Harvard educated PhD call ‘superfoods’ scientific bullsh*t as it was music to my ears. This certainly isn’t a diet book nor is it one that’s like to catch on with those looking for the latest fad but it does make sense in terms of how our biology follow basic laws of physics and chemistry.

I need to read this book, couldn't concentrate on the audio.