Outlive

• Health & Fitness / Longevity 
• Self-Help / Aging
• Science / Life Sciences / Human Anatomy & Physiology

A groundbreaking manifesto on living better and longer that challenges the conventional medical thinking on aging and reveals a new approach to preventing chronic disease and extending long-term health, from a visionary physician and leading longevity expert

Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.
For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, rather than waiting.
This is not “biohacking,” it’s a strategic and science-based approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Attia’s aim is less to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health, in order to create the best plan for you as an individual. In Outlive, readers will discover:

• Why the cholesterol test at your annual physical doesn’t tell you enough about your actual risk of dying from a heart attack.
• That you may already suffer from an extremely common yet underdiagnosed liver condition that could be a precursor to the chronic diseases of aging.
• Why exercise is the most potent pro-longevity “drug”—and how to begin training for the Centenarian Decathlon.
• Why you should forget about diets and focus instead on nutritional biochemistry, using technology and data to personalize your eating pattern.
• Why striving for physical health and longevity, but ignoring emotional health, could be the ultimate curse of all.

Aging and longevity are far more malleable than we think; our fate is not set in stone. With the right road map, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your exepctations to make each decade better than the one before.Excerpt:
 
I’ll start with what “longevity” isn’t: Longevity does not mean living forever. Or even to 120, which some longevity experts are routinely promising to their followers. Barring some major breakthrough that, somehow, someway, reverses two billion years of evolutionary history and frees us from time’s arrow, everyone and everything who is alive today will eventually die. It’s a one-way street.
 
Nor does longevity mean merely living longer, notching more and more birthdays as we slowly wither away. In fact, when they first come to see me, most of my patients insist that they don’t want to live longer, if doing so means lingering on and on in a state of ever-declining health. Many of them have watched their parents or grandparents endure such a fate, still alive but crippled by physical frailty or cognitive decline. They have no desire to re-play that movie.  
 
Here’s where I stop them. Just because your parents endured a painful old age, or died younger than they should have, I say, does not mean that you must do the same. The past need not dictate the future. A century ago, life expectancy hovered somewhere under age 50, and people were most likely to die from “fast” causes of death: accidents, injuries, and infectious diseases of various kinds. The majority of people reading this book can expect to die somewhere around age 80, give or take, almost all of them from the chronic diseases of aging that I call the Four Horsemen: Heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and complications surrounding type 2 diabetes. 
 
The point is, in the last century or so, slow death has supplanted fast death. In order to achieve longevity, to live longer, and live better for longer, we must understand and confront the causes of slow death.
 
One of the main problems in anyone’s quest for longevity is the fact that the  skills that my colleagues and I acquired during our medical training proved to be much more effective against fast death than slow death. We could fix broken bones, wipe out infections with powerful antibiotics, repair and even replace damaged organs, and stabilize severe brain and spinal injuries. But we were markedly less successful at helping our patients with chronic conditions, such as cancer or vascular disease, evade slow death. We could relieve their symptoms, and often delay the end slightly, but it didn’t seem like we could reset the clock the way we could with acute problems.
 
The problem is not that we aren’t trying. It’s that in every case involving the Horsemen or diseases that lead to slow death, we are intervening at the wrong point in time, well after the disease has taken hold. When it’s already too late. The evidence is overwhelming that each of the Horsemen diseases  takes hold long before any clinical diagnosis is reached. The logical conclusion is that we need to step in sooner, to try and stop the Horsemen in their tracks.