TriCEM is hosting a breakfast featuring Dr. Sam Urlacher of Duke University. He will be giving a lecture titled Childhood energetics in EvMed perspective: Metabolic energy allocation, developmental plasticity, and the nutritional/epidemiological transition.
December 3, 2018, 8:00-9:30 am
If you are interested in attending the breakfast, please email Grace Farley at grace.farley@duke.edu, as TriCEM breakfasts are by invitation only.
More information on Dr. Urlacher’s research can be found here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/samuel_s_urlacher/home
Abstract: “The way in which humans use metabolic energy is central to evolutionary (e.g., life history theory) and epidemiological (e.g., nutritional transition) frameworks for understanding variation in phenotype and health. Nonetheless, energetics research has largely been limited to industrialized populations, and we know very little about how people living in subsistence-based contexts – characterized by limited nutrition, infectious disease, and active lifestyles – actually spend calories. Understanding energy expenditure regulation during childhood is particularly critical, especially for addressing the early life origins of obesity and chronic disease that emerge during economic development. In this talk, I focus on my ongoing research with Shuar forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Ecuador. I discuss the importance of energy allocation tradeoffs with immune activity (e.g., inflammation, antibody response) in shaping patterns of childhood growth. I also highlight the use of direct energetics measures to demonstrate that, despite dramatic differences in environment and lifestyle, Shuar total energy expenditure (kcal/day) is indistinguishable from that of children living in the US. These findings have implications for understanding the regulation of energy balance, and I argue that constraint and tradeoffs in childhood energy expenditure shape lifetime trajectories of phenotype and metabolic health.”