Justin Bullock, FISM News
A new medical study has discovered that the decay of the body’s metabolism as a person ages is much slower than previously thought. This is good news for older people who are worried about gaining weight simply by getting older, but bad news for all those who have used the “slowing metabolism” excuse for adding on extra pounds for years. It also indicates that weight and nutrition are much more dynamic and complex than it has been understood up to this point.
The doctors conducting the study indicated that the results of the study point toward a more balanced and active approach with respect to diet and weight management. Making sure that people are eating, sleeping, and exercising sufficiently in a holistic way that makes sense for their particular situation, is much more important than anything else. The study indicated that metabolism peaks for people at one years old and gradually increases by around three percent annually until approximately 20 years of age. From 20 to 60 years old metabolism generally plateaus.
Scientists said that this progression concurs with previously known science, as 60 is also the age where the likelihood of developing a noncommunicable disease or disorder dramatically goes up. In effect scientists discovered that around 60 years of age human beings body tissue changes and begins to decline. The scientists had this to say about the study:
Metabolic rate is really stable all through adult life, 20 to 60 years old. There’s no effect of menopause that we can see, for example. And you know, people will say, ‘Well when I hit 30 years old, my metabolism fell apart.’ We don’t see any evidence for that, actually… There’s nothing sort of more fundamental and basic than how our bodies burn energy, because that represents how all our cells are busy all day doing their various tasks, and we didn’t have a good sense of how that changes over the course of a lifespan. You need really big data sets to be able to answer that question. And this was the first time that we had the ability to do this with a really big data set that would allow us to pull apart the effects of body size and age and gender and all these things on our energy expenditures over the day… People thought, ‘Well, maybe it’s because you’re less active, or maybe it’s because people tend to lose muscle mass as they get into their 60s, 70s and older. But we can correct for all those things. We can say, ‘No, no, no, it’s more than that.’ It’s that our cells are actually changing… The decline from age 60 is thought to reflect a change in tissue-specific metabolism, the energy expended on maintenance. It cannot be a coincidence that the increase in incidence of noncommunicable diseases and disorders begins in this same time frame.