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The ‘dad bod’ is not inevitable, even if evolution helped make it happen

Lower testosterone can drive a less toned physique. Pushing back should be less about perfection and more about men remembering to take care of themselves.

7 min
It's not always easy to fit in exercise, but it is important, experts say. (iStock)
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What if evolution led us to the “dad bod”?

In humans’ evolutionary past, a drop in testosterone may have helped men adjust to and increase their involvement in their children’s lives, says Lee Gettler, an anthropologist who has studied the science of men’s changing bodies. But lower testosterone can also drive a softer, less toned, paunchier physique, a.k.a. a dad bod.

“The biological traits that were beneficial in the environments we lived in hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago are now mismatched to aspects of our current environment,” says Gettler, director of the Hormones, Health and Human Behavior Lab at the University of Notre Dame. Meaning that lower testosterone helped those early hunter-gatherers become better fathers — but at a time when life involved lots of physical activity and less than abundant food.

“The important thing to message to dads about this is that we just need to keep trying to work hard to the best of our abilities to take care of our bodies,” Gettler says. “It’s hard when you have to try to get enough sleep and you have to try to get enough exercise and you have to try to not finish the chicken nuggets on the kid’s plate, even though you don’t want to waste them at the restaurant.”

Research on men’s bodies

In a study Gettler and colleagues conducted in the Philippines, “we found that new dads with newborns have very substantial drops in their testosterone, on average, which could reflect changes during pregnancy or immediately in the period after their babies are born.”

The men in the study were in their 20s, and their testosterone went down about 25 percent on average. “That’s a big biologically meaningful change,” Gettler says. “Far greater than what might be simply due to aging, which might only drop testosterone levels 10 percent per decade after the 30s.”

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