Recently, the Price-Pottenger Nutrition
Foundation newsletter News for Now Update included a link to a fascinating article on the Science website that discusses how new research is contradicting long-held beliefs about how our bodies burn calories. The startling finding, based on studies
comparing energy utilization in hunter-gatherers and sedentary Americans, is that humans who exercise more don’t burn more calories.
Hunter-gatherers use more calories in exercise, but their bodies compensate by using less energy elsewhere. The researchers involved speculate that “hunter-gatherers’ bodies adjust for more activity by spending fewer calories on other unseen tasks, such as inflammation and stress responses.” Since excessive inflammation and overactive stress responses
are both unhealthy, this could explain the undeniable health benefits of exercise.
To put this into the model that I use, an overactive stress response comes from an overactive sympathetic nervous system, while excessive inflammation comes from an overactive parasympathetic system. Exercise helps achieve and maintain balance in the two halves of the autonomic nervous system.
Those of you who are interested in metabolism and physiology may well find this article as fascinating as I did. For some more thoughts on exercise, please visit this page on my website.
