![\"Older](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/my-smart-watch-878381-Copy-VkSEqx.jpeg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1\")
Most of us remember a time when we could eat anything we wanted and not gain weight. But a new study suggests your metabolism\u2014the rate at which you burn calories\u2014actually starts its inevitable decline much later than we all assumed.<\/p>\nMost of us remember a time when we could eat anything we wanted and not gain weight. But a new study suggests your metabolism\u2014the rate at which you burn calories\u2014actually starts its inevitable decline much later than we all assumed.<\/p>\n
Additionally, we tend to think of our teens and 20s as the age when our calorie-burning potential hits its peak. But the researchers found that, pound for pound, infants had the highest metabolic rates of all.<\/p>\n
Duke University associate professor Herman Pontzer joined an international team of scientists to analyze the average calories burned by more than 6,600 people ranging in age from one week to 95 as they went about their daily lives in 29 countries worldwide.<\/p>\n
Focusing on puberty, menopause, and other phases of life, Pontzer, the study\u2019s co-author was surprised. \u201cWhat\u2019s weird is that the timing of our \u2018metabolic life stages\u2019 doesn\u2019t seem to match those typical milestones.\u201d<\/p>\n
Previously, most large-scale studies measured how much energy the body uses to perform basic vital functions such as breathing, digesting, pumping blood\u2014in other words, the calories you need just to stay alive. But that amounts to only 50% to 70% of the calories we burn each day. It doesn\u2019t take into account the energy we spend doing everything else: washing the dishes, walking the dog, breaking a sweat at the gym, even just thinking or fidgeting.<\/p>\n
To come up with a number for total daily energy expenditure, the researchers relied on the \u201cdoubly labeled water\u201d method. It\u2019s a urine test that involves having a person drink water in which the hydrogen and oxygen in the water molecules have been replaced with naturally occurring \u201cheavy\u201d forms, and then measuring how quickly they\u2019re flushed out.<\/p>\n
Scientists have used the technique\u2014considered the gold standard for measuring daily energy expenditure during normal daily life, outside of the lab\u2014 to measure energy expenditure in humans since the 1980s, but studies have been limited in size and scope due to cost. So multiple labs decided to share their data and gather their measurements in a single database, to see if they could tease out truths that weren\u2019t revealed or were only hinted at in previous work.<\/p>\n
Pooling and analyzing energy expenditures across the entire lifespan revealed some surprises, including the data showing that babies have the highest metabolic rates of all.<\/p>\n
During the first 12 months of an infant\u2019s life, their energy needs shoot upward, such that by their first birthday, a one-year-old burns calories 50% faster for their body size than an adult.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s not just because, in their first year, infants are busy tripling their birth weight. \u201cOf course they\u2019re growing, but even once you control for that, their energy expenditures are rocketing up higher than you\u2019d expect for their body size and composition,\u201d said Pontzer.<\/p>\n
An infant\u2019s gas-guzzling metabolism may partly explain why children who don\u2019t get enough to eat during this developmental window are less likely to survive and grow up to be healthy adults.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething is happening inside a baby\u2019s cells to make them more active, and we don\u2019t know what those processes are yet,\u201d Pontzer said.<\/p>\n
After this initial surge in infancy, the data show that metabolism slows by about 3% each year until we reach our 20s, when it levels off into a new normal.<\/p>\n
Despite the teen years being a time of growth spurts, the researchers didn\u2019t see any uptick in daily calorie needs in adolescence after they took body size into account. \u201cWe really thought puberty would be different and it\u2019s not,\u201d said Pontzer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Midlife was another surprise. Perhaps you\u2019ve been told that it\u2019s all downhill after 30 when it comes to your weight. But while several factors could explain the thickening waistlines that often emerge during our prime working years, the findings suggest that a changing metabolism isn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n
In fact, the researchers discovered that energy expenditures during these middle decades\u2014our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s\u2014were the most stable. Even during pregnancy, a woman\u2019s calorie needs were no more or less than expected given her added bulk as the baby grows.<\/p>\n
The data suggest that our metabolisms don\u2019t really start to decline again until after age 60. The slowdown is gradual, only 0.7% a year. But a person in their 90s needs 26% fewer calories each day than someone in midlife.<\/p>\n
Lost muscle mass as we get older may be partly to blame, the researchers say, since muscle burns more calories than fat. But it\u2019s not the whole picture. \u201cWe controlled for muscle mass,\u201d Pontzer said. \u201cIt\u2019s because their cells are slowing down.\u201d<\/p>\n
The patterns held even when differing activity levels were taken into account, according to the research, which was published August 12 in\u00a0the journal\u00a0Science<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and funded by the National Science Foundation and IAEA.<\/p>\n For a long time, what drives shifts in energy expenditure has been difficult to parse because aging goes hand in hand with so many other changes, Pontzer said. But the research lends support to the idea that it\u2019s more than age-related changes in lifestyle or body composition.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of this points to the conclusion that tissue metabolism, the work that the cells are doing, is changing over the course of the lifespan in ways we haven\u2019t fully appreciated before,\u201d Pontzer said. \u201cYou really need a big data set like this to get at those questions.\u201d<\/p>\n (Source:\u00a0Duke University<\/a>)<\/p>\n The post Metabolism Does Not Slow Down in Mid-Life as is Commonly Believed, Says Study<\/a> appeared first on Good News Network<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of us remember a time when we could eat anything we wanted and not gain weight. But a new study suggests your metabolism\u2014the rate at which you burn calories\u2014actually … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10533,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[494,578],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-longevity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/morning-sad-walk-frustration-depression-exercise-pubdomain-Emma-Simpson-1024x567-nMXgaY.jpeg?fit=1024%2C567&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Qv5g-2JS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4647,"url":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/?p=4647","url_meta":{"origin":10532,"position":0},"title":"How Exercise Can Increase Metabolism By Turning White Fat Into Brown","author":"Will Clower","date":"October 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Exercise may aid in weight control and help to fend off diabetes by improving the ability of fat cells to burn calories, a new study reports. 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