According to conventional wisdom, our metabolism rises in our teens, thanks to puberty's hormone rush. It then plummets precipitously when we reach 30 and continues to decline with age.
Although the rate at which your body burns calories or expends energy does change with age, a large recent study has shown that this happens on a different timeline.
Science data suggests that metabolism rises in infancy and then slows down by around 3 percent per year until our 20s. This new normal is stable for decades after it reaches its lowest point. The metabolic rate does not begin to decrease again after 60 years of age, and even then it is only slowly: less than 1% annually.
"There are many physiological changes that occur as you grow up and get older -- think puberty or menopause," says Herman Pontzer (author of Burn), a study on human metabolism. It's strange that our metabolic milestones don't match the typical ones.
Pontzer and a team of over 80 scientists analysed the average daily calories consumed by people in 29 countries using data spanning 40 years. The study subjects were aged between one week and 95 years. 64 percent of them were female while 36 percent were male.
Pontzer states, "All this points to the conclusion tissue metabolism -- that is the work that cells are doing -- changing over time in ways that we haven’t fully appreciated before." To answer these questions, you really need a large data set such as this.
A data set of this size can't tell the story about an individual whose metabolism rate has been affected by the average. You could be one of these outliers if your health or your waistline took a hit prior to the expected age of 60.
It is possible that other powerful factors, such as socioeconomic, medical and behavioral circumstances, are also playing a part in metabolism.
Experience Life published the post Metabolism Changes with Age -- Just not When You Think appeared first on Experience Life.
