Outlive
Earlier this year I watched a documentary series called “Limitless” on Disney Plus about Chris Hemsworth’s mission to discover, with the help of experts, how we can live longer and better. One of those experts was Peter Attia, MD. I love fitness and exercise physiology but I have zero background in biology or medicine. I was therefore interested to learn more so I picked up Dr. Attia’s book Outlive.
The central message of Dr. Attia’s book is much less controversial or innovative than many other books out there or even what you might expect from the documentary series. Attia does not promote any quick fixes or extreme ideas (for most people, he does not recommend intermittent fasting and relatively few pages are dedicated to saunas or ice baths). Rather, his approach is about adopting data-backed, pragamatic habits and practices that will increase our chances of extending what he calls “healthspan”. Healthspan is the number of years of our life that we maintain our cognitive, physical and emotional health. Healthspan and lifespan are intertwined — the actions we take to improve our healthspan will almost always result in a longer lifespan.
Attia identifies four chronic diseases of aging, what he calls the “four horsemen” that cause “slow” death: heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease) and type 2 diabetes. Modern medicine (what Attia dubs Medicine 2.0) is really good at extending the lifespan of people with these diseases by about ten years. What modern medicine is not good at, is educating and enabling individuals to avert these diseases of old age in the first place and thereby extending both healthspan and lifespan. The way we do that is the unsurprising part, but it’s the part that modern medicine isn’t good at (you guessed it, Medicine 3.0): Educating individuals to develop habits and practices earlier in life. These are:
- Exercise: specifically aerobic efficiency, max aerobic output (VO2 max), strength, stability
- Diet/nutrition: quality, quantity
- Sleep: if there was anything close to a super drug, it’s sleep.
- Emotional Health: managing stress, mental health
- Drugs/supplements: nothing controversial here, blood pressure medication, protein, etc.
Again, this is not controversial or new information but Outlive examines the current evidence-based science on these preventative measures in a sober and enlightening manner, using anecdotes from him own life and his time as an oncological surgeon. The advice is not gimmicky, which is my style. It might be morbid reading or talking about our own mortality, but as Attia says “not thinking about it won’t make it any less inevitable.” I’d take it one further in saying that (within reason) not taking action makes it all the more likely to happen sooner. We can’t do everything, but it just so happens that doing the right thing will make your life all the more rich and fulfilling while you’re here.
