How to Outlive
In his book ‘Outlive - The science and Art of Longevity’, Peter Attia argues that we can all take systematically determined actions to extend our lifespan irrespective of our genes.
Attia has an interesting backstory which led him to his recommendations. He took a first degree in Applied Maths and Engineering but switched to medicine after seeing the good it could do. He became a surgeon and started to witness two kinds of mortality. First the quick death brought on by crimes such as knife attacks, but also the slow death caused by identifying conditions after they had started. As a cancer surgeon he writes movingly about being able to prolong life using his skill, but only for a limited period.
Frustrated by this, he quit medicine and went to work for the consultants McKinsey, where he spent his time analysing credit risk for banks. This led to his subsequent epiphany, that a more personalised, analytical and longer-term approach would lead to living a healthy life for a longer time, and he returned to medicine.
He describes his approach as ‘Medicine 3.0’ (‘Medicine 1.0’ being the practice of non-scientific approaches until the middle of the 19th century, and ‘Medicine 2.0’ being the effective treatment of potential causes of fast death such as trauma, infections etc). However, Medicine 2.0 has done little to benefit the extension of healthy life for conditions he calls ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ These are heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative conditions and type 2 diabetes.
A large section of the book is devoted to highlighting actions that can be taken each of acting individually to reduce the risk of acquiring these conditions. This part of the book is hard to absorb if you have limited medical knowledge, but stick with it as I did and you will learn something. The author believes the single most important area is exercise, but he also mentions sleep, diet and emotional health. On the latter he writes movingly of how he has consciously changed himself to engage more with his family and become less of a workaholic.
More details on the book here: -
He also has a podcast called ‘Drive’ available on all the usual platforms. Episode 248 is an interview about the book.
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