What Happens to Our Metabolism?

Have you ever said or heard someone else say, “I could eat whatever I wanted when I was young and I never gained weight!” What usually follows is something like, “Now I seem to gain weight just by thinking about a donut!”—the type of food may vary depending on the individual. Kids seem to eat anything they want and stay rail thin. Riley grew five inches between his five-year and six-year physicals but gained only three pounds. The logical question is what happens to metabolism as we get older?

Researchers in the Pennington Biomedical Laboratory attempted to find out together with researchers from around the world. As a combined effort, they recruited over 6,000 subjects between the ages of six months and 95 years old. The reason they needed so many research facilities is that the technique used to assess metabolism is labor intensive; it would have taken a decade for a single facility to do it. They didn’t test only resting metabolism. They were able to test the metabolism of subjects over several days under a variety of everyday conditions—in other words, people just living their lives.

There was no surprise from the aging perspective: metabolism declines as we get older. But when metabolism peaks and when it declines the most was surprising. I’ll cover that on Saturday as well as what we might be able to do to deal with it.

Tomorrow night is the Insider conference call. If you have questions you need answered about nutrition, supplements or exercise, this is the forum to get the most complete answers. If you’re not an Insider, join before 8 p.m. Eastern to participate.

What are you prepared to do today?