"Exercise is by far the most potent longevity drug." - I can't agree more with this. So if you're someone who wants to get back on the health track, this book gives some good pointers. If you're already on a routine however, you'll get a confidence boost that you're on the right track.

Author does provide details about cholesterol consequences, glucose and insulin interaction, chemotherapy impact and alcohol effects. I did find a good number of those interesting. The book also advocates to treat sleep as an investment that'll reap benefits even in the long run.

"Focus not only on 'resume virtues' but also on 'eulogy virtues'." - quite thought provoking. ( )

Gets you motivated to care about your health
Elevates your understanding of some functions, like sleep, which increases motivation to care for it
Connects striving for longevity with increasing your health span and living a better life
The way the author explains metabolic functions helped me understand its importance and functions

- Not concise (!)
- Pretends to be more original than it is (Concept of Medecine 2.0 versus 3.0 is helpful, but the author is part of a trend, not its instigator)

Why the 3 stars?
While reading the book, I felt like the author was missing a crucial point. He does devote the last chapter to emotional health with his own personal journey as a therapy patient.
I can only speculate how this book got written: The author got a book contract, started on the path to describing how to hack our biology to live to a hundred, realized along the way, probably after 90% of the book was written, that the whole thing in the end has nothing to do with biohacking, but rather everything to do with having a reason to live to a hundred and this reason is deeply rooted in emotional wellbeing and connectedness with family and community.

I feel like the book is overhyped because at the time I picked it up, it had 4.4 / 5 on Goodreads and it felt to me incomplete in so many ways. Nothing close to a Masterpiece. ( )

NF

This book is *a lot* and will probably take another pass to fully digest all of the information included. I discovered the author when he was a guest on another podcast and was intrigued. I listed to it on audiobook and will likely get a hard copy as well, so I can go back for reference. My biggest take away is that the old adage 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' should really be considered when thinking about longevity and how well we feel/how healthy we are. There is not a one size fits all plan for everyone but taking accountability for your own health decisions and using as much of your health data as you can to make your own plan will likely be the best step. It's definitely got me thinking about longevity and healthcare related decisions more.

The author bills the science presented as Medicine 3.0, but at every turn my intuition screamed that what was being presented was at best Medicine 2.1. Not bad if Medicine 3.0 wasn't actually out there, but I feel that it is. You should still read “Outlive”. You should read all such books, popular health or popular medicine, I guess we call it, popular as much for an ability to speak with accessibility to the general populous as having any actual popularity.

We are in an age of embarrassing riches, no more so than with the feast of high quality, well-researched, well-meaning, thoughtful, and nuanced texts presented by such highly qualified individuals. It is to our detriment that we ignore even the scantest evidence where our greatest resource, our health, is concerned. For Peter Attia, I would say that although you can take the doctor out of the training, it's much more difficult to take the training out of the doctor. You really must read it to decide for yourself as I only have my gut instincts to go on. The science is infinitely complex and there is little agreement among the professionals about what it all means. At a certain point we have to trust the deeper parts of our intelligence to take over, synthesizing mountains of data and the various interpretations of those data. Intuition gets short shrift in our society.

Peter Attia seems in the throws of the paradigms he's struggling against, still very much attuned to a mid- to a late 2oth century mindset, a practice still bounded by old understandings despite an ostensibly cheery prognosis overall.

I'm hesitant to give specifics and argue against professional training, but the areas that pinged my radar the highest were his advice on exercise, his reliance on numbers and extreme testing, and his underestimation of the power of fasting. It all seems a bit out of balance to me.

Compare and contrast (for yourself) this book against books like Richard Johnson's “Nature Wants Us to Be Fat” (2022), Daniel Lieberman's “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding” (2021), and Steve Hendricks “The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting” (2022). There are many areas where these books are in agreement with Attia's advice, but worrying in the ways they disagree, sometime sharply. This list of books of course is in no way exhaustive, with new science coming at us every day. We are foolish if we don't at least try to make sense of it all. The stakes are ridiculously high. The price too precious. ( )