Daily total energy expenditure (TEE) is the total number of calories an individual burns each day. TEE measures are critically important for investigating fundamental questions about energy allocation, human physiology and adaptations, as well as for understanding how individual characteristics and lifestyle factors are related to common morbidities such as obesity and diabetes. However, TEE data are difficult to obtain and use given the expense of data collection and limited data accessibility across projects. This project will support the development of a freely accessible global database of over 10,000 TEE measurements, contributed by leading TEE laboratories in the U.S. and other countries. Making these TEE data openly available to researchers will advance science in biological anthropology, physiology, and public health. This project will also support training and education workshops, with outreach to underrepresented groups in STEM, to educate researchers in biological anthropology and related fields in current techniques and advances in metabolic research, and to foster synergistic research across basic and applied sciences in human biology and health.
The database will house n=10,000+ measures of TEE and related data (anthropometrics and ecological variables) for populations around the globe. All TEE data are from doubly labeled water measurements, the gold standard for TEE. This project will use these data to test the effects of anthropometrics, reproductive status, and ecological factors on TEE. The online database and freely available R scripts will be developed to encourage and support use of the database by researchers worldwide. A workshop will be held to train researchers (especially early career and underrepresented groups) in modern methods of metabolic research.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
