Diet and Death | Dr. Peter Attia | EP 360
So, the question is: where did the standard American diet come from? The standard American diet was nothing more than the solution to a business problem. The standard American diet is what is killing [Music] [Music] people.
Hello everyone! Today I'm speaking with physician, longevity expert, and now author Dr. Peter Attia. We discuss his new book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity and explore the immense benefits that can be gained from exercise in just 3 hours a week; how small imbalances in diet can cause major problems such as diabetes and obesity; the difference between lifespan and health span; the soured reasoning behind the American food pyramid; and the scientific side of alternative diets—no buzzwords.
Looking forward to the discussion today, Dr. Attia. In your book, you talk about lifespan in general, but you also concentrate on a concept called health span. You're concentrating more on decades, let's say, of healthy life rather than absolute length of life. Do you want to expand on the concept of health span and why you distinguish between that and longevity per se?
Yeah, longevity is really a function of lifespan and health span. Lifespan is the easier of those two to understand because it's binary: you're either alive or you're dead. I think when most people think of longevity, they think of the elongation of lifespan, understandably. But you know, that's really only part of it. The other part, the part that might actually be more important to most people when pressed on the issue, is health span, which is the quality of life.
The medical definition of health span is not a particularly helpful definition in my view. It's effectively the period of time from which you are free of disability and disease. But I don't really think that captures what health span is to most people. I think health span is a broader concept, and it's not binary; it is analog. It really constitutes some measure of cognitive health, physical health, and emotional health. At least two of those are intimately linked to age, which is to say they generally decline with age.
But if we focus, I think relentlessly, on the pursuit of those things, we tend to get a better quality of life overall. And by the way, I think you get for free a lot of lifespan benefits. It's very important to get the definitions and the measurements right because systems optimize to maximize their score on what they're measured by. I suppose living to 140 wouldn't be so good if you were senile for the last 70 years and institutionalized, for example.
It sounds like when you talk about health span, you're intermingling two quality of life issues. One would be the expansion of youth rather than longevity per se, and then something associated with the existential quality of life. So maybe we could start with, well, does that seem to capture—do the interaction of those two things seem to capture what you're talking about with regard to health span?
Yeah, I think so. I think that the cognitive and physical piece are the pieces that do decline with age and we want to preserve those as long as possible. We can be very specific about what those things are, by the way. We could drill into what is cognitive health span, what is physical health span. And then that other one, that is not so age-dependent, might be at least as important and probably, frankly, falls much more into your wheelhouse than mine professionally at least. And that is about the quality of a person's life and the quality of their relationships, their sense of purpose, and things of that nature.
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