[rubashov]

The article says hadza walk many miles per day but burn the same calories as sedentary westerners. How is this possible? Well you go look at the table in the study and the hadza are all 30kg lighter than westerners. The men are all apparently 5'4 and 115lb, if you look at the BMI. That's probably 115lb at sub 5% bodyfat, too.

The study claims to control for body size. I didn't read it. But I still suspect we're looking at an apples to oranges situation here. A little dude of pure muscle who has been walking 10 miles a day his whole life is essentially incomparable to a fat sedentary Westerner.

I don't think the data presented predicts that if you had 6' fat sedentary people walk three miles a day they wouldn't lose weight, but that's almost claimed in the article.

[icegreentea]

Obviously, if you had a 6' fat sedentary person suddenly start walking 3 miles a day, they would lose weight. That's actually -not- the claim of the paper. The paper claim is that total energy expenditure is largely uncoupled with physical activity levels. For example, within the Hadza they found no real difference in energy use compared to different amounts activity. They also found no relation between body fat percentage and total energy use.

What this points to is that if you give the human body time to adapt to any set of conditions, you'll likely end up burning roughly the same amount of calories.

Here's the actual paper by the way: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.po...

[dleibovic]

The gist of the article is this: the reason people are fat today is not because they burn fewer calories per day. In fact, they burn the same amount as hunter gatherers. Thus, the reason people are fat today is because they consume more calories per day.