How to quantitatively measure work done by a biological system?
Measuring the work done by a biological system seems pretty impossible. Imagine how many different ways one cell of your body uses energy (ATP). You can't really measure all the work done by every cell on a macro scale. Metabolic efficiency has been defined as... "health". That seems just a little ambiguous. That's why we use things like averages to determine if energy use is normal or not, such as in metabolic age.

In short, work is a more tangible term in discrete physics examples, but there is so much complicated energy use in biological systems that total systemic work can't be easily defined.