Peter Attia proposes war tactics for aging – 11/06/2023 – Balance

With so much nonsense and poorly disguised science fiction out there when it comes to longevity or, God forbid, “immortality”, finding an author who approaches the topic with his feet on the ground and some brains is a relief.

This is the main virtue of “Outlive: The Art and Science of Living Longer and Better”, a book written by Canadian doctor Peter Attia in partnership with journalist Bill Gifford.

Forget this thing that one day we will all live well over a century, says Attia. Current science is still a long way from even envisioning this possibility as something realistic.

For him, both doctors and patients would be spending their time much better if they devised a strategy to face what he sees as the great Achilles’ heel of human health today: average life expectancy has increased a lot, but the final decades of Most people’s lives are, in general, qualitatively terrible.

The problem is well known. In short, advances in areas such as basic sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics have made the Homo sapiens practically won its eternal war against microbes and viruses.

People stopped dying from infectious diseases in childhood and youth and began succumbing, usually in old age, to chronic illnesses. Today, the overwhelming majority of the population dies from cardiovascular problems, cancer, diabetes and neurodegenerative disorders.

The proposal of the book is that this situation should not be inevitable. It would be possible, argues Attia, to offer a wide range of people the same quality of life that those who reach the age of one hundred in health enjoy. However, to achieve this objective, it is necessary to think as one would think about a war, with a clear, well-defined, but also flexible strategy and tactics.

And this, according to him, is something that current medicine (which he calls “medicine 2.0”) is not capable of doing, due to its lack of focus on the earliest possible prevention.

“Medicine 2.0”, he laments, is too focused on filling holes created by chronic diseases when they have already taken a significant hold in the body. And this means that doctors who follow this approach are not able to make a difference to the patient’s health. At most, they would be able to gain a few years of life, or survival, the quality of which will not be the best.

Therefore, argues Attia, we need a “medicine 3.0”, strongly focused on prevention, which considers that diseases of old age actually begin to take hold in the body when we are still in our 40s, or even just after 30. years.

This is where the book’s weaknesses begin to become a little more apparent, although combined with a good dose of common sense.

For one thing, in some cases, the technology that would allow for this hyper-early detection of the first cancer cells or the first signs of cardiovascular problems is not yet available — despite the encouraging possibility of things like “liquid biopsies” that would help see these early signs. of cancer.

Furthermore, the authors do not discuss the extent to which seeking treatments so early could end up producing side effects, without taking into account that problems at an early stage would have the chance of not progressing.

On the other hand, the book proposes a simple approach, without inventions and frills, to maintain good health until close to one hundred years of age. The recipe is exactly what everyone knows they should do, but doesn’t do: regular exercise, moderate and healthy eating, regular sleep, care for mental health. Easy, right?

In fact, not so much, especially in the case of physical exercise, since Attia proposes a regularity and intensity much higher than what most people, even with good financial conditions, would be able to undertake: daily aerobic, strength, of flexibility that sometimes feels like full-time work.

The problem, in the end, is that Attia sees the issue of healthy longevity, at least in this book, as an exclusively personal project, aimed at those who are determined and lucky enough.

The point, however, is that we are facing a challenge that is also population and collective, as the average age of humanity continues to rise throughout this century. To face this situation, it will take much more than willpower and time to go to the gym and eat right every day.