Moment 142: These Daily Habits Are Slowly Hurting Your Lifespan: Peter Attia
Dec 29, 2023
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Peter Attia, a longevity expert and author of 'Outlive,' discusses the pressing need for 'Medicine 3.0,' emphasizing preventative health measures. He highlights that most people face lifestyle diseases and how life expectancy hasn't significantly improved since the 1800s. Attia argues for early health management, stressing that proactive choices can drastically alter one’s health trajectory. He likens health investments to saving for retirement, urging listeners to start worrying about their health now to ensure a better future.
Medicine 3.0 emphasizes the need for a paradigm shift towards prevention, starting early in life, to combat lifestyle diseases and improve longevity.
Understanding the lifelong process of aging is crucial for making informed decisions about health and prioritizing preventative measures from a younger age.
Deep dives
Medicine 3.0: The Need for Prevention
The podcast episode highlights the need for a paradigm shift in medicine towards prevention in order to live longer and better lives. Most people today are at risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other chronic illnesses. Despite advances in medical treatments, life expectancy has not significantly improved. Medicine 3.0 emphasizes early prevention and personalized approaches to health. It acknowledges the importance of true prevention starting from early in life, as well as the need to tailor medical interventions to individuals. The episode emphasizes the importance of understanding both the risks of taking action and the risks of not acting, and challenges the traditional approach of only considering short-term risks. Prevention is crucial, even if it comes with its own set of risks.
The Aging Process Starts Early
The podcast explores the concept of aging and how it affects different aspects of our bodies throughout our lives. While some aspects, such as muscle quality, peak in our 20s and 30s, others, like certain types of cognition, start to decline during this period. The discussion also highlights that certain diseases, like cardiovascular disease, actually begin in early life, even though they may not manifest until later. The significance of slowing down disease progression during young adulthood is stressed, as it can have a profound impact on long-term health outcomes. Understanding the lifelong process of aging helps individuals make informed decisions about their health and prioritize preventative measures from a younger age.
The Five Pillars of Medicine 3.0
The podcast identifies and discusses the five pillars of Medicine 3.0, which are exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress management, and the use of drugs, hormones, and supplements. It highlights that conventional medicine often fails to adequately address these pillars. Exercise is given lip service, without specific guidance provided by most healthcare professionals. Nutrition, sleep, and stress management are generally overlooked during medical training, despite their importance for overall health. Furthermore, doctors often lack understanding of supplements and hormones. Medicine 3.0 calls for a comprehensive approach to health that incorporates these pillars and provides individuals with the knowledge and tools to optimize their well-being and longevity.
In this moment, longevity expert and author of ‘Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity’, Dr Peter Attia discusses ‘Medicine 3.0’.
Most people in today’s world will die from lifestyle diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. In fact, Dr Attia says that our life expectancy hasn’t greatly increased since the 1800s, medicine just means we don’t die from infectious diseases.
To live longer and better in our later years, Dr Attia says that we need a new playbook, or what he calls ‘Medicine 3.0’. This relies on taking preventative steps very early in life, as the risk of lifestyle diseases compound throughout our life. Dr Attia argues that while doctors practising traditional medicine are very aware of the risk of doing certain treatments, but often ignore the cost of not taking action to prevent future problems.
Dr Attia believes that too often we worry about our health too late in life, when the problems start and the risk of taking action is higher. Instead, he argues, that if we take action when we are younger we have so much potential to change the trajectory of our lives. He says that we should start worrying about our future health now, and should think about it the same way as we think about saving for retirement, if we invest now we will thank ourselves later.