Last year I wrote of a meta-analysis on energy expenditure in industrialized countries vs developing countries, that counter-intuitively found that it was on average not different. Today a study by Herman Pontzer and colleagues published in PLOS ONE adds to this debate on whether food or being sedentary is primarily fueling societal obesity, by comparing a Western population with a modern hunter-gatherer population, the Hadza. And again the results are unexpected. Here is a summary of the study Read more [...]

Do people in developing countries have higher total energy expenditures and physical activity levels than industrialized countries?  Most of us would assume so, but a new study adds to existing research suggesting otherwise. Dugas et al. performed a meta-analysis on studies that measured total energy expenditure and physical activity level (ratio of total energy expenditure to resting energy expenditure) in adults.  Importantly, they only included studies that used doubly labeled water, the gold Read more [...]