Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinegel. And this

week, I want to talk about a groundbreaking new study on metabolism, specifically what

does and doesn't happen to our metabolism during middle age. Most of us reach our final

adult height at around age 18 or 20. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that we stop growing. On average,

Americans continue to gain a pound or two a year every year from the time that they reach

adulthood until age 60 or so when this trend starts to reverse. Of course, by then, a lot

of damage has been done. Although gaining a single pound or two over the course of a year

isn't going to make a big difference in your health, gaining 30 or 40 pounds over the course

of your adult lifespan can have a significant negative impact on your risk of diabetes,

heart disease, cancer, and other conditions related to obesity such as knee pain and sleep

apnea. So what drives this weight gain in middle age? There's long been an assumption

that this seemingly universal trend is due at least in part to a slowing of the metabolism

in midlife. We've all been told that our body's engines simply revel a little faster when we're

younger and that there's not that much that can be done. If we want to avoid gaining weight through

midlife, we're going to have to spend more time exercising or adjust our food intake to compensate

for this inevitable slowing of the metabolism. Now, if you refuse to go gently into this good

night, you can find all kinds of special diets, workouts, and supplements promising to

goose up your middle-aged metabolism. To the extent that any of these actually succeed in boosting

your resting metabolic rate, the effect is likely to be quite small. As I've said before,

trying to lose weight by boosting your metabolism is like trying to row a boat with a butter knife.

You're going to be rowing for an awfully long time without moving very far. But a new study is

throwing all of these assumptions about midlife metabolism into the blender. Researchers used

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