energy expenditure Archives - Amazing Health Advances

How to Hack Your Metabolism and Improve Your Health

AHA Publisher — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 07:00:27 +0000

Diana Bletter via Israel21c – Israeli startup Lumen offers a handheld breath analysis device that allows users to “hack their metabolism,” as cofounder Michal Mor explains. “If you have information about how your metabolism is working, you can improve your own health,” Mor tells ISRAEL21c. Mor and her twin sister, Merav, didn’t set out to start a high-tech company. The sisters, who were born in California and moved to Israel at age two with their parents, originally wanted to be physicians. Instead, they studied medical laboratory sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. They each received a master’s degree and a PhD in physiology — Merav specializing in heart arrhythmia and Michal in cardiac science. The sisters, each a mother of three children, live near each other in Tel Aviv. In their spare time, they are Ironman athletes, and Merav is a divemaster while Michal does competitive pole acrobatics. They first became curious about metabolism when they were training for an Ironman triathlon. The event is grueling. First, a 2.4-mile (3.86 km) swim, then a 112-mile (180.25 km) bicycle ride, followed by a marathon of 26.22 miles (42.20 km). The one-day event usually takes about 16 hours to complete. “Many competitors crash and don’t have the energy to finish,” Mor said. It became clear to them that “we had to be able to efficiently use fats and carbohydrates to be able to do the race.” Metabolic Flexibility The Mor sisters started searching for “metabolic flexibility,” a common term in the scientific community, “but nobody spoke about what exactly you can do to make it happen.” “We wanted to understand what was the best way to fuel our bodies,” Mor said. She and her sister became their own guinea pigs and began experimenting with nutritional methods — on themselves. “After a long swim in the sea in the morning, we’d eat meatballs and pasta,” Mor said. The method they devised for what they ate and when was so successful that they both finished the race with so much energy, they immediately registered for the next one. After that race, the sisters decided to investigate how to better measure their metabolism to get the information they needed. Tests in hospitals would have required “lying down for at least 45 minutes dressed like an astronaut and then you need a doctor to analyze the data an hour later,” is how Mor describes it. At first, they wanted only to find a home-based way to measure their own respiratory exchange ratio (RER), which indicates whether the body is getting its energy from fat or carbohydrates. A Family Business After four years of research and development, they created Lumen with three others: Avi Smila, who is chief information officer; Dror Ceder, chief growth officer; and Daniel Tal Mor, who is the CEO (and Michal’s husband). Michal Mor is head of science for products, a task in which she studies the “complicated metric of metabolic flexibility to make it accessible to everyone.” Merav Mor is the company’s chief scientist. In 2016, beta trials for the Lumen device began; Lumen was officially launched via an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in 2018. The device and app can connect with programs like Google Fit as well as Bluetooth to integrate users’ data. In addition to giving people a window on their metabolic health, the Lumen app – available by subscription — offers ideas for meals, including alternative suggestions if people “don’t like what’s on the menu.” There are selections for vegetarians and vegans as well as for those with food allergies, helping people understand what makes up a balanced meal. Translating Bodies Today, the company has 115 employees with offices in Israel as well as New York. Its yearly sales figures are not disclosed. One of Lumen’s breakthrough research findings is tracking how women’s metabolism changes according to each phase of their menstrual cycle. “There is a lot of research about men’s physiology,” Mor said, “and we’re using our knowledge to meet the specific needs of women.” While athletes use Lumen for their training regimen, others use the device and app to manage their health by measuring how their body is burning calories and learning what they can do to “reach their health and fitness goals.” Mor says that Lumen has helped users lose weight when used on a consistent basis, but most importantly increases metabolic flexibility by 66%. She said there is no other company that offers people the chance to measure their metabolism at home. “What we want to do is translate people’s bodies for them,” Mor said. “We’re helping people look inside and get the information they need.” For more information, click here To read the original article click here.

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Diet or Exercise? New Research Shows Which One Leads to Weight Loss

AHA Publisher — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 07:00:51 +0000

Lorie Johnson via CBN News – People who want to lose weight need to cut calories, not increase their exercise expenditure. Although exercise is necessary for overall health, research shows increasing our movement can’t make us thin. These findings come from years of research on cultures that endure strenuous physical activity each day who don’t have a lot of food. A prime example would be the Hazda people living in southeast Africa. Duke University researcher Dr. Herman Pontzer and his team first examined the Hazdas’ daily energy output ten years ago. “Of course they’re so physically active,” Dr. Pontzer told CBN News, “Men are walking ten miles a day, women are walking six or eight miles a day. We were sure they’d be burning so many more calories than people in the US and Europe and industrialized populations.” They were wrong. Knocked Their Socks Off The researchers witnessed and documented extreme levels of exercise among the hunter-gatherer people group. However, using highly advanced and accurate measurement techniques, they discovered the Hazdas didn’t burn more calories than their couch-potato counterparts half a world away. “Instead what we found,” Dr. Pontzer said, “It knocked our socks off, was that actually, Hadza men and women, who are incredibly physically active, burn the same number of calories as we are here in the US.” That number? “On average, men burn about 3,000 calories a day, women burn about 2,500 a day just by virtue of being a little bit smaller,” he said. In his book, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy, Dr. Pontzer lays out a number of similar studies on calorie expenditure in different cultures around the world over the last decade that all reached the same startling conclusion: people who exercise more don’t burn markedly more calories than people who hardly exercise at all. “What we find is that people who are really physically active are burning the same number of calories as people who are less active, in fact, even more sedentary,” Dr. Pontzer said. How Can This Be? To help explain this metabolic mystery, scientists discovered that regardless of how much we exercise, the human body’s daily calorie expenditure primarily consists of burning most of its energy in ways that keep our bodies operating. “Your immune function, your reproductive function, just staying alive day-to-day,” Dr. Pontzer said, adding that things like thinking, breathing, and digestion burn a lot of calories. Dr. Pontzer says he and his fellow scientists learned that when people exercise a great deal, the body’s metabolism shifts in a way that doesn’t allow a person to burn more calories. “Your body makes adjustments in those activities and how much it’s spending on those activities to make room for physical activity,” he said. Although excess exercise prevents people from losing weight, which many overweight westerners may view as a drawback, since these cultures have an abundance of food, it also prevents people from starving to death in cultures that don’t have a lot of high-calorie foods. Watch What You Eat In light of this discovery, how does a person drop those unwanted pounds? Pontzer says the answer is easy to understand but difficult to implement. “So if you want to manage your weight, you want to focus on diet,” he said. Scientists tell us we should look to the old adage, “calories in versus calories out.” In other words, our weight is determined by the difference between how many calories we consume versus how many calories we burn. Dr. Pontzer says since we now understand the number of calories we burn is relatively fixed, in order to manage our weight, we need to focus on the variable that is flexible: the number of calories we consume. Surprisingly, however, he discourages people from trying to count them because people tend to make mistakes. “It’s actually really hard to pay attention to the calories you eat every day,” he explained, ” You forget. Or you sort-of misestimate how much you eat. It happens to everyone.” Instead, he recommends daily weighing and adjusting food intake based on what the scale reads. If the number on the scale is higher than you’d like, cut back on what you’re consuming. Dr. Pontzer says the best place to start is by avoiding processed items such as sugary drinks and prepared packaged foods. “They’re literally engineered for you to over-consume,” he said. Dr. Pontzer says people who are trying to lose weight should replace processed foods with whole foods. These are items that are close to their original state[s], such as fresh produce, meat, fish, and dairy. Many of these items can be found on the exterior of the grocery store. They are foods that are generally lower in calories than processed foods while at the same time make you feel fuller than processed foods. Pontzer stresses that even though exercise is not necessary to lose weight we still need to exercise. Physical activity helps fight disease in many ways such as lowering inflammation, improving brain function, and strengthening the cardiovascular system. To read the original article click here. For more articles from CBN News click here.

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