Dr. Herman Pontzer

Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Research Associate Professor of Global Health at Duke University, investigates how our species’ evolutionary past shapes our lives today. His team conducted the first measurements of daily energy expenditure in traditional hunter-gatherers and in non-human apes, with findings that have challenged the way we think about diet, exercise, metabolism, and health. Dr. Pontzer’s new book, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy, published in March, 2021.

We burn 2,000 calories a day. And if we exercise and cut carbs, we’ll lose more weight. Right? Wrong. In this paradigm-shifting book, Herman Pontzer reveals for the first time how human metabolism really works so that we can finally manage our weight and improve our health.

Pontzer’s groundbreaking studies with hunter-gatherer tribes show how exercise doesn’t increase our metabolism. Instead, we burn calories within a very narrow range: nearly 3,000 calories per day, no matter our activity level. This was a brilliant evolutionary strategy to survive in times of famine. Now it seems to doom us to obesity. The good news is we can lose weight, but we need to cut calories. Refuting such weight-loss hype as paleo, keto, anti-gluten, anti-grain, and even vegan, Pontzer discusses how all diets succeed or fail: For shedding pounds, a calorie is a calorie.

At the same time, we must exercise to keep our body systems and signals functioning optimally, even if it won’t make us thinner. Hunter-gatherers like the Hadza move about five hours a day and remain remarkably healthy into old age. But elite athletes can push the body too far, burning calories faster than their bodies can take them in. It may be that the most spectacular athletic feats are the result not just of great training, but of an astonishingly efficient digestive system.

Revealing, irreverent, and always entertaining, Pontzer has written a book that will change how you eat, move, and live.

Herman Pontzer
Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Global Health

How did the human body evolve, and how does our species’ deep past shape our health and physiology today? Through lab and field research, Dr. Pontzer investigates the physiology of humans and other primates to understand how ecology, lifestyle, diet, and evolutionary history affect metabolism and health. He is particularly interested in cardiometabolic disease and the lifestyle factors that protect against obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other noncommunicable diseases that are common among industrialized populations but rare or absent in non-industrialized societies.

Dr. Pontzer’s field projects seek to understand how diet, activity and other ecological factors influence the physiology and health of people in small-scale societies, including hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers in east Africa and South America. Back at Duke, his lab research focuses on energetics and metabolism, including respirometry and doubly labeled water methods.

To learn more about the Hadza hunter-gatherer community, please check out
https://www.hadzafund.org/