outlive

<h1 id="outlive-by-peter-attia">Outlive by Peter Attia</h1> TLDR: Do more excercise, don't smoke, get good sleep, and try not to drink. A great book that focuses on 4 diseases that kill most people. A way to live longer is to simply prevent the occurance of those diseases. These diseases are, starting from the deadliest: <ol> <li>Atherosclorotic disease</li> <li>Cancer</li> <li>Neuordegenerative disease.</li> <li>Insulin resistance diseases (type 2 diabetes, and fatty liver).</li> </ol> Peter places an emphasis on prevention and/or tackling diseases really early on. Getting bloodwork, colonoscopies, and genetic tests (among other things) really early on to stand a better chance of winning against a disease. If, for example, you get some genetic markers that make you more susceptible to Alzheimer's disease, then you better focus your attention on preventing that specific disease (which as it stands today, is not completely well understood). Medicine 2.0, as Peter calls it, focuses on threating symptoms rather than preventing the disease. For a variety of reasons, this is more lucrative for the healthcare complex. Regardless, this is not something that I would like. I'd rather be healthy to begin with. Medicine 2.0 has done great things but it is not without its flaws. Medicine 2.0 has a great focus on extending the lifespan rather than the healthspan. On countless occasions, I've been to the doctor with my bloodwork for an annual check-up but more than once I have been rebuffed with a comment like "you wasted your money, you don't need this". Perhaps, but I have made some lifestyles changes after noticing a high level of LDL, or low vitamin D. Medicine 3.0 encourages checking your health on a regular basis. As I understood it, excercising is the best way to improve you healthspan. He encourages 4 types of exercises: stability, strength, aerobic, and anaerobic. This has changed the way I workout. And it also should change yours. As far as diet goes, he doesn't think it matters that much. As long as you hit your protein intake. There are other things that matter, too. Fats are necessary for healthspan. Low-fat diets are far from ideal: the book refers to a study where people on low-fat diets have a significant higher mortality rate than those on a diet with some fat. Calories also matter, to some extent. You want to minimize the amount of visceral fat, either by burning more energy than you consume, or by eating less than you burn. What you eat doesn't seem to matter that much. But I think most people will find it easier to eat unprocessed food that often has a low caloric density over highly processed food which often has high caloric density.