Maybe I'm reading the study wrong, but it doesn't seem like they accounted for caloric intake at all? https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420902122

They accounted for total EE and basal EE, but the data they've supplied in the appendix doesn't track caloric intake.

This seems like a huge miss to me, as it is absolutely possible to have a sky-high TEE while being insanely fat (American football linebackers) and also having a low TEE and being skinny as a rail (by basically not eating, i.e. most fad diets).

Also, they categorize most of Africa as either horticulturalist, agropastoralist (why couldn't they say "farmers"???) or hunter-gatherer) despite the table at the bottom ranking their economies as "lowHDI", and the BEE for this cohort is N/A, which invalidates their PAL ratio (TEE/BEE).

idk this seems like a "fat ppl bad" study to me.

> This seems like a huge miss to me, as it is absolutely possible to have a sky-high TEE while being insanely fat (American football linebackers)

Linemen would be a better example than linebackers here. Linebackers tend (like most positions other than line, and especially offensive line, positions) to have body fat percentages at the high end of the normal range, rather than being “insanely fat”.