Herman Pontzer

Pontzer is an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke who measures how much energy human bodies actually use, and his fieldwork with the Hadza in Tanzania produced a result nobody expected: hunter-gatherers walking many miles a day burn roughly the same daily calories as office workers, because the body economises elsewhere. Burn sets out what that means for exercise and weight, which is that exercise is essential for health and close to useless for losing weight on its own. He is careful about the limits of the data and says plainly which parts remain contested.