"I don't always watch TV, but when I do, I watch sports talk shows. Stay informed, my friend."

OK, that's probably not what The Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercials would utter if asked about his viewing habits, but it's true for me. And since I'd be a front-runner for a contrary commercial series featuring The Most Uninteresting Man in the World, I'll use that loose link as the lead-in.The only problem is I've consumed less than a total of two half-bottles of beer in my lifetime - and I don't really watch sports talk on TV.But I do listen to it.Most weeknights, I'll turn on sports talk in the living room while I cook and consume my supper in the kitchen. And no matter which of the concurrently running shows I choose, they all seem to have what one host calls a "read-and-react" segment. This host in particular asks a guest a question and then only allows 15 seconds to answer.I find such segments superficial, but the important connection here (Yes Virginia, there really is a connection!) is that our speed-of-light lifestyles have created a society full of superficial surface skimmers - and that's especially true with health-and-fitness information.People don't read full articles anymore, but the overhyped headline gets them talking about the topic to a co-worker who heard from his neighbor who has an uncle who ....You get the idea. Unfortunately if you engage in this sort of news gathering, you don't get any real insight either.Consider the newspaper headline that I recently read: "Exercise may have limits for weight loss," as well as its subheading: "Study suggests calorie burning hits a plateau." That story ran a bit after an Internet site covered the same results of a research study this way: "Why does exercise alone not aid long-term weight loss?"I read both intently, expecting to learn something new. I did not. The original study published in the journal Current Biology simply confirmed what prior research had already established: that the body becomes more efficient with repetition.As a child first learning to do so, writing your name clearly and correctly was probably a time-consuming endeavor. In all likelihood, writing out 15 sentences to practice your penmanship made your wrist and fingers ache.Now, however, you sign a check in seconds and dash off a one-page letter with no discomfort.Why would your adaptation to exercise be any different? Yet that's all the research really showed.Specifically, researchers at City University of New York's Hunter College studied 332 adults from five countries between the ages of 25 and 45 by having them wear calorie-counting devices to determine caloric expenditure for seven days. The degree of exercise was not dictated to the subjects.The researchers found -surprise, surprise - that the subjects who engaged in "moderately active" exercise burned about 200 more calories per day than those who were sedentary. While that number was lower than I expected, there were a number of possible explanations not provided by the articles that could account for the discrepancy.First, the heavier subjects were probably the sedentary ones. Second, calorie expenditure during exercise is affected by body weight.For example, the 230-pound male college running back is going to burn far more calories than the 110-pound female cross-country runner when both take the hourlong spinning class in the offseason to stay in shape. Furthermore, no definition of "moderate level of activity" was provided in either article.At the end of the first, however, Dr. Timothy Church, a professor of preventative medicine at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, was asked to comment on the Hunter College research.He said that the relatively few subjects who did more than the "moderate level of activity" made it hard to draw any substantive conclusions, but that he would question what this research really means to Americans attempting to lose weight.Despite this study, Church still believes that "physical activity is going to add to the caloric expenditure for the vast majority."Counteracting Church's claim in the second of the two articles is an observation made by Herman Ponzer, the lead researcher of the Hunter College study, who is an associate professor of anthropology there. In his work with the Hazda, hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania, he has found that they have relatively low energy expenditures despite walking long distances every day and doing a lot of physical work as part of their everyday life."Aye, but there's the rub.Think about what would happen if I gave you a scythe and told you to harvest an acre of grain. Being unfamiliar with such physical activity - including the actual scything motion - you would burn a ton of calories per hour that day.But three weeks later, you would not be burning nearly the same amount of calories. But it's not really because you "plateaued" as the aforementioned articles would suggest: it's because you've acclimated.There's a tremendous difference between the two because the best exercise programs don't allow for your body to truly acclimate.In short, the research reported out of Hunter College is accurate. The slant on the study that many newsgathering agencies choose to use, however, paints a negative picture of it when all it really does is reaffirm established science.