On the other extreme we find populations living in deserts, the Arctic or similar marginal habitats and who have spent more than seven hours a day hunting or gathering [2]. The very high level of physical exercise exerted by the Tarahumara Mayans of Mexico [7] can hardly be considered representative for traditional human populations. Physical activity undoubtedly exerts a number of potentially beneficial effects on cardiovascular risk factors, including reduction of blood pressure, body weight and waist to hip ratio, and elevation of HDL (good) cholesterol [8]. Higher levels of physical activity are furthermore prospectively associated with lower mortality [9-10]. Besides its possible genuine effects, exercise may facilitate an adequate intake of essential nutrients by way of increased energy expenditure .
Nevertheless, available evidence do not suggest that exercise is as efficient as dietary changes to lower body weight [8, 12] or blood pressure [13], nor do cross-cultural surveys indicate that a high level of physical activity is a necessary condition for very low rates of coronary heart disease. Well generally I have to agree with you. The original post probably deserved a more developed response then I gave it. I think you would probably agree with me though, that however minimal a hunter/gather’s energy expenditure actually was, it was probably much greater then those of us munching away at our keyboards. I’ve always been a little distrustful of statistics concerning how much time people spent gathering food.
I think your numbers are ok, I just think there is a tendency to ignore trifling situations such as those days when no amount of work gathered any food whatever. How many articles do you have concerning bands of overweight hunter/gathers? Besides, getting back to grubs, most accounts I’ve come across count them as delicacies, as in they don’t get them much. By the way, most insects are quite low in fat and high enough in protean to satisfy the needs of even dedicated predators.
Enjoyed your site and will get to your reading list as soon as I move into a new place. Until then I must maintain that with physical exercise and restraint, we too can safely enjoy steaming platters of roasted grub. Yes, most probably. But we can easily find groups of Westerners with higher energy expenditure from manual labour who nevertheless are subject to coronary heart disease just about as often as those with a sedentary lifestyle. None whatsoever. There is firm evidence that they cannot become overweight until they adopt a Western lifestyle and I think diet has been much underestimated here.
