Question/Theory

[bleat]

Hey all,

I have a question which has developed itself into a theory of sorts...

I have a big German Shepherd which does a lot of running around, yet we only feed it a chunk of dog roll a day and a dozen biscuits, yet he maintains his decent size. Obviously he's smaller than me, but pound for pound I eat a LOT more than him. Bear with me I'm going somewhere with this :wink:

So why do I require so much more energy? Obviously our bodies are composed quite differently but I would think/hope the main difference would be the level of brain activity.

Regardless to the validity of the above thinkings this leads to my inevitable question: Does someone sitting down performing a mindless task burn the same number of calories as say someone sitting down for the same period of time undergoing strenuous mental action?

I'm a newbie to all of this really, I'm sure it's due to metabolism rates, or something but you'll have to excuse me I've been in bed the past two days sick with the only thing to do being feeding the dog. The worst part is I've lost 5kg I worked so hard over our so called 'summer' putting on

[Pseudonym]

Sorry to hear that, bro. It's not nice being sick, but sometimes the forced rest is what your body needed anyway. Keep your food and fluid intake up, and don't worry about the 5kg... it'll come back quickly enough when you start training again.

Now for your dog. It's a good question, but I don't know the answer. So I'll throw you another angle instead...

Let's take an orangutan, since I'm guessing they'd be closer to us in weight/activity level/metabolism than a dog would. Obviously they don't have the same mental activity as us, though they're still fairly intelligent.

According to http://www.nagonline.net/Diets%20pdf/Or ... rition.pdf which has all you could ever wish to know about orangutan nutrition, their caloric intake seems to be more than a human's.

According to Kleiber, caloric needs of orangutans can be estimated from the general equation 140 kcal * (body mass) ^ 0.75 (Robbins 1983). For captive animals ranging iin size from 40 kg (adult female) to 75 kg (adult male), energy needs for maintenance would theoretically be net with 2227 to 3568 kcal metabolizable energy per day (ME/day) (Walker 1978). Zoo diets analyzed from the survey supplied 723 to 6733 kcal/day/individual, with an average of approximately 2650 kcal (n=9). No apparent links with reproductive success or animal health were evident from calories fed; the zoo feeding the least total calories per day also reported obesity as a problem.

I'm not quite sure what that proves - perhaps they expend more energy than we do. Anyway, I'm off now - all this thinking is making me hungry! :grin: