Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy
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Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Herman Pontzer (Author), P.J. Ochlan (Narrator), Penguin Audio (Publisher)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 1,165 ratings
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One of the foremost researchers in human metabolism reveals surprising new science behind food and exercise.

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.

This audiobook edition contains a downloadable PDF of charts included in the print edition.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

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  1. Listening Length
    11 hours and 24 minutes
  2. Author
    Herman Pontzer
  3. Narrator
    P.J. Ochlan
  4. Audible release date
    March 2, 2021
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Penguin Audio
  7. ASIN
    B08FL6Y69D
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 11 hours and 24 minutes
Author Herman Pontzer
Narrator P.J. Ochlan
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date March 02, 2021
Publisher Penguin Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B08FL6Y69D
Best Sellers Rank #22,274 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#22 in Endocrinology & Metabolism (Books)
#59 in Exercise & Fitness (Audible Books & Originals)
#85 in Weight Loss Diets (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
1,165 global ratings
Fascinating Read for the Nutrition Enthusiast
4 Stars
Fascinating Read for the Nutrition Enthusiast
If you're looking for a book that will solve all your woes with your weight, this is not it, but if you want to learn more about human metabolism, this is a great read. I love Pontzer's wit, and the details of his interactions with hunter-gatherer populations as an anthropologist are intriguing, if not entertaining. He covers a lot of ground, trying to make many evidence-based assertions in 316 pages of text. He tackles the basics of metabolism, attempts to convince the reader that the weight loss really can be reduced to being in a calorie deficit, advises that exercise for weight loss is a fool's errand (but still imperative for one's health) and even gets into climate change as a symptom of our ever-expanding energy consumption which can be attributed to our own biology. I think he makes a lot of good points.He goes head to head with the insulin model of weight loss (Jason Fung fans be warned), argues against claims put out there by Perlmutter and Taubes (if you're a fan of current nutrition research, you'll know these guys), and holds on to the conclusion that Ancel Keys came to in his famous studies about fat and heart disease (which have mostly been rejected in the scientific community). I wish he addressed the microbiome's contribution to weight, but I know this isn't really in his purview as an anthropologist. He really inspires you to do some critical thinking! He does confuse correlation with causation in a few instances, but it's ok, his perspective is valid. I have come away from this book understanding more why exercise is so important even if it doesn't result in weight loss directly. I also feel a little worried about our fate as a species, as we seem destined to demise either by destroying our health, or by destroying our planet. But I remain an optimist, and will keep fighting the good fight, trying to teach people the power of personal choice when it comes to our own health, and alleviate some of the shame around our sense that we're never quite reaching the standards that have been externally determined for us.
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Top reviews from the United States

Dr Ali Binazir
5.0 out of 5 stars A fun, authoritative & witty guide to the latest science of metabolism, exercise & weight loss
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2021
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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., Chief Happiness Engineer and author of  The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible , the highest-rated dating book on Amazon, and  Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine
105 people found this helpful
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Laura G.
5.0 out of 5 stars Ignore the gimmicky title. This is science not “diet advice”.
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2021
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I see some reviews here thinking they were getting a “diet book”. This is not a “diet book”. This is a (lay-person language) summation of evolutionary anthropological research into human, primate and other mammal metabolism. It is the scientific foundation on top of which all the trendy diet fads are trying to build (and this book can help you understand why some work and some don’t).

I personally found the book to be immensely interesting and insightful. I’ve never heard of how they actually measure metabolism properly. I’d never heard of the Hazda people and their lifestyles. I knew we’d made “bogey men” out of a lot of various nutritional components over the years, but other than thinking none of them sounded particularly correct, I didn’t know where the myths had come from until I read this book.

After reading this book, you’ll also have an appreciation about just how damn hard your body is working to keep you with good energy supplies because it’s preparing for a famine or drought. (It doesn’t know we’ve perfected farming and supply chain in wealthier areas of developed nations).

Tl;dr : this book is not a diet book. This book is a lay-person language science book to help you understand actually HOW energy works in the human (and primate and mammal) body. After reading this you’ll have the actual scientific knowledge to understand why many diets are scams; you’ll be able to skip those and the physical and mental damage they’ll do to you.

(Of note: I have a doctorate in STEM, took far more chem / ochem than I ever wanted, and spent *many* years in cellular biology / immunology labs. They never thought to teach us evolutionary anthropology and how it relates to cellular processes it seems. I learned a LOT from this book.)
16 people found this helpful
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NeverConvex
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, carefully researched argument, but sometimes makes poorly phrased melodramatic claims
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2023
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I've got one chapter left to go in Pontzer's book, and am a layperson (though an uncommonly picky one when it comes to popular science) re: the study of metabolism, but I've really enjoyed his book so far.

I think he does the following very well:

- digestible, careful review of methodology and physical/biochem basis for doubly labeled water studies of metabolic output, including an interesting discussion of their history and why it wasn't until as late as the 80s that the became cheap enough for us to begin collecting a decent amount of data. This methodology forms the basis of most of the book
- similarly digestible, careful review of human metabolism (Krebs cycle, ATP production, etc), although only a few qualitative facts about this (e.g., that macronutrients are metabolically substitutable, albeit with some tradeoffs; or, distinction between anaerobic and aerobic energy output) tend to figure centrally in the book's arguments
- impressive range of studies discussed while *mostly* keeping descriptions of their major methodological features clear
- interesting cross-species total and resting energy expenditure discussions/speculation, especially in the first third of the book
- description of evolutionary theory is entirely qualitative but also generally seemed accurate and well-reasoned. Occasionally indulges himself in commentary on issues clearly well outside his expertise, but rare enough that it wasn't too bothersome
- weaving in goofy anecdotes (not what I came to the book for, but keeps the reading light and airy)

And I think he does this other stuff not very well:

- he often is prone to sloppy language, especially when it comes to claims about how dramatically adaptable human metabolism is, how pessimistic he is of relying on exercise for weight loss, and how dramatic he thinks constraints on human metabolism are. This issue is significantly reduced by the second to last chapter (which covers extreme metabolic events; triathlons, Tour de France, transatlantic rowing, pregnancy, etc), but it's still pretty annoying that the book is littered with claims that exercise will do nothing for weight loss, when much of the very evidence he reviews suggests the opposite. It feels to me as if he often gets very carried away and describes the most extreme form of his 'constrained metabolism' model, even though the evidence he has can be explained by a much more moderate form of it
- is also occasionally sloppy with language in disciplines outside of his own. e.g., confused medians and averages, claiming at one point that 50% of observations are always above/below the arithmetic mean. Doesn't undermine any of his arguments fundamentally, but as a persnickety math person it annoyed me, and made me wonder where else he may have been less than fastidious
- his discussion of satiety/hunger is a lot less compelling, and methodologically much less rigorous or clear, than his discussion of doubly water labeled total energy expenditure studies
- he devotes a fair number of pages in the middle of the book to arguing about trendy diet fads. The discussion seemed fine and his critiques reasonable; I mostly just didn't have much interest in reading anything about these in the first place, so found myself bored when he started devoting a lot of time to it
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Top reviews from other countries

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juan antonio montaraz
5.0 out of 5 stars Información novedosa sobre el metabolismo energético del humano
Reviewed in Mexico on April 1, 2022
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Excelente libro para entender cómo funciona el metabolismo energético del Homo sapiens.
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Rob Phippen
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, surprising, full of revelations
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 14, 2024
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This book totally blows up my preconception that, if you exercise more, you can eat more!

It’s extremely engagingly written. The only exception is a chapter on the details of the pathways for metabolising each kind of nutrient. I found that very dense. But that does not detract from the extreme readability of the book as a whole. Recommended.
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vanderputten
2.0 out of 5 stars Western culture is bad
Reviewed in the Netherlands on March 30, 2024
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The book starts promising. Then it develops into a unscientific narrative on systemic racism, climate change, sea level rise and a very negative view on western culture. The same western culture that enabled him to go to Africa and write this book.
The topic on endurance sport is superficial and completely ignores the work of South African scientist professor Tim Noakes on cycling and keto.
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bytheway
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating - but Phinney/Volek NEVER said "low carb" for everyone
Reviewed in Germany on November 26, 2023
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The Hadza are extremely impressive - and hunter/gatherers that certainly don't come across as low carb. But they are just one tribe - and thus certainly don't prove all of humanity's ancestors ate like this.
And the low carb Universe's leading voices Steve Phinney and Jeff Volek emphasize: low carb is not necessary (or even advisable) for all of us.

Certainly, though, for those with "Expanding Waistline/Lose Weight & Keep it Off.....Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes/Save Life & Limb" = Thrive on Low Carb Diet", see the graph below (from p vii of "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living" by Jeff S. Volek, PhD, RD and Stephen D. Phinney, MD, PHD).

Please, Herman Pontzer, correct this - the quotation of Steve Phinney is wrong. And Volek/Phinney mention the Massai and the Inuit merely as examples of traditional low carb lifestyles - they do not say everyone has eaten/should eat like this.
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bytheway
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating - but Phinney/Volek NEVER said "low carb" for everyone
Reviewed in Germany on November 26, 2023
The Hadza are extremely impressive - and hunter/gatherers that certainly don't come across as low carb. But they are just one tribe - and thus certainly don't prove all of humanity's ancestors ate like this.
And the low carb Universe's leading voices Steve Phinney and Jeff Volek emphasize: low carb is not necessary (or even advisable) for all of us.

Certainly, though, for those with "Expanding Waistline/Lose Weight & Keep it Off.....Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes/Save Life & Limb" = Thrive on Low Carb Diet", see the graph below (from p vii of "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living" by Jeff S. Volek, PhD, RD and Stephen D. Phinney, MD, PHD).

Please, Herman Pontzer, correct this - the quotation of Steve Phinney is wrong. And Volek/Phinney mention the Massai and the Inuit merely as examples of traditional low carb lifestyles - they do not say everyone has eaten/should eat like this.
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Rinnie
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in Canada on March 17, 2021
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Already recommended it to the kids
The book explains clearly where our civilization is falling short and where we should be heading
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