This Week, I'm Reading...

Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, by Peter Attia, MD

My brother and sister-in-law and now my older daughter can’t stop talking about Outlive. It reminds me of how hard I was evangelizing for Why We Sleep a couple of years ago. Some books make an outsized impression, and this appears to be one of them. Attia’s premise is fairly simple. What he calls Medicine 2.0 (medicine after the advent of germ theory) tries to fix problems way too late, instead of identifying the precursors to disease and heading them off at the pass. He’s not talking so much about preventative medicine—although that’s certainly part of it—as he is about responding to early warning signs that currently go unrecognized because of the establishment’s mindset. So, he wants us, the patients, to understand what our doctors probably won’t tell us until it’s too late. He’s after the big four that eventually take down 80% of us: “heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction.” We’re all going to die (in case you didn’t hear that news from Senator Joni Ernst this week, with apologies for the political insertion). But what Attia wants to help us do is live longer and experience a shorter decline—rather than a decline of a decade or more—at the end of our lives. That’s the simple part. He does venture into the weeds in the metabolic chapter (the one I’m reading now) with mTOR and AMP-activated protein kinase, which I tried to follow and which some of you will follow better. It’s good he offers the details for readers who can “digest” them. In any case, he’s not offering a fad diet or even a prescription for living because he’s clear that depends on a lot of individual factors. I’m interested, though, to learn more and figure out what I’m doing that might not be as healthy as I think it is.

What are you reading this week? Let us know in the comment section below!