Herman Pontzer is an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, where he is associate professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health.^[1] He is best known for his research into human bioenergetics^[2][3][4] , specifically as it relates to animals' (including human's) total energy expenditure.

In the context of the exercise paradox (where weight-loss was not a direct outcome of all the calories burned), Pontzer helped develop a theory of human metabolism where the total amount of a human's energy expenditure (calories) is not the additive linear sum of the individual's metabolic parts (e.g., calories burned during basal metabolism, expediture of energy for movement, reporoduction, digestion, immune system, etc.), instead it is a model whereby daily energy expenditure begins linearly and then plateaus off at some tipping point, suggesting some evolved constraint in the total energy expended in a human's day.

This new model is coined the constrained daily energy expenditure model^[5]

• Pontzer, Herman (2021). Burn: The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism . Penguin. ISBN 978-0141990170.
• Pontzer, Herman (2025). Adaptable How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us. Random House. ISBN 9780593539309.