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Epidemiology and Population Health

Exercise is essential for health but a poor tool for weight loss: a reply to Allison and colleagues

International Journal of Obesity volume 47, pages 98–99 (2023)Cite this article

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I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Allison and colleagues’ commentary regarding the media coverage of work by me and others suggesting physical activity (exercise), while important for health, is generally ineffective for weight loss.

My early work on daily expenditure and lifestyle investigated whether living in a hunter-gatherer society, with prodigious amounts of physical activity, caused people to expend more energy per day. My colleagues and I expected it would, and tested this by measuring total energy expenditure (TEE; kcal/d) among the Hadza, a traditional hunter-gatherer community in northern Tanzania, using gold-standard doubly labeled water methods. The results were eye-opening. Using multiple regression to control for body size and composition, as Allison and others have recommended [1], we found Hadza adults’ TEE were indistinguishable from those of comparatively sedentary Westerners [2]. These results echoed earlier work by Luke and colleagues with rural Nigerian women [3], and we have replicated our work with the Hadza in subsequent doubly-labeled water studies with the Shuar [4] and Tsimane [5], physically active indigenous groups in South America who forage for wild foods and engage in subsistence farming.

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  1. Dept. of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Herman Pontzer

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Correspondence to Herman Pontzer.

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Pontzer, H. Exercise is essential for health but a poor tool for weight loss: a reply to Allison and colleagues. Int J Obes 47, 98–99 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41366-022-01248-3

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