Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
Ratings57
Average rating4.3
Inspired me to add some weight training workouts more focused specifically on adding muscle mass. If I live to see a healthy and active 100 years, I'll upgrade my review to five stars.
About 2-3x longer than it should have been. Great perspective on aging in terms of what gets in the way of “health span” & what we can do to avoid that. But he goes into far too much detail about the underlying biochemistry which gets boring & tedious.
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.
The book is way too long and often buried in the weeds of this acronym versus that acronym, and you should track this and that so you can feel potentially one percent better for two extra years at the end of your life. And then there was the oddly deeply heartfelt last few chapters that didn't fit in with the scientifically analytical voice of the whole rest of the book. That said, I really liked how at the end of the day, the key points were that you should ONE get 8hrs of sleep TWO eat a normal (non-processed) diet, THREE spend time light-jogging in nature FOUR lift weights and FIVE avoid depressive modes of thought. I don't recall any chapter where it said that you should drink eight glasses of water per day, but I'm assuming that was implied.
I like the author's gift for storytelling, especially stories about his own life, and his own internal struggles. And I really appreciate that he read the audiobook himself because his voice is so crystal clear I could mostly blast through the book at 3.5x and skip over the acronym sections, thereby reducing 17hrs to a much more appropriate 6 hours or so.
I liked about one third of the content very much. This was about useful information about exercise, nutrition, sleep and mental health. This parts of the book are worth 5 stars for me.
The other two thirds were quite boring or even mildly annoying for me. They consist mainly of anecdotes or way too long explanations for things that could be expressed with a fraction of the words. These parts are more like 1 star for.
On average, I can still give 3 stars, because the goods parts were really good.
I not sure whether I want to recommend this book. Probably not.