Book Review: Outlive - The Science and Art of Longevity
A hopeful vision for the future of medicine and health
Dr Peter Attia’s Outlive is the most important, impactful and thorough book I’ve read in a long time. I couldn’t be more grateful to have found its wisdom in my 20s.
There have been generations who all grew up with relatives who’d died at war. Now, the prevailing war is one of chronic illness. Slow death, as Attia calls it. The kind of death that happens painstakingly over years or decades. Loved ones are made to watch the suffering. Cancer, Heart Disease, Metabolic Disease, Dementia. In my generation, this is how our grandparents die. As children, we visit the bedsides of deteriorating grandparents. We never really know them as anything but a patient. And we watch our parents slowly creep in the same direction, gradually developing the same pathologies. It’s hard not to feel doomed to the same fate.
But we don’t want this slow death. If you ask a young person, we’ll say something like “I’d rather die healthy at 65 than be sick for decades and die in my 90s”. But how do we achieve this healthy life? I honestly hadn’t stopped to think about that question much, until recently. In Outlive, I found some concrete answers and guidance.
This book has a wealth of knowledge and is written with the appropriate nuances, aiming to give tools to every person to improve their health now, so they can live well, and long. It dodges the common yet gloomy politicisation of medicine, health and pharma. This is a book of solutions. Of teaching. Of optimism and hope.
This is not a book about living forever or even extending lifespan per se. The goal is to maximise healthspan, i.e., the period of time one lives healthily, without aid. Attia asks readers to create their own centenarian decathlon. What 10 activities do you want to be capable of in your final decade? Maybe it’s carrying groceries up 3 flights of stairs, taking a light hike, picking up grandchildren, or dancing with a partner. Set your own decathlon, Attia says, and train your whole life for it. Calculate in reverse how fit, healthy and capable you need to be now, to ensure you’ll still be capable of those goals at 90.
This is a powerful approach because breaks the assumption that we are all doomed to the same health decline that our elders have followed. It emphasises taking care of yourself for your own future benefit, a motivation more pure, deep and beautiful than any vague incentive driven by market forces that ride on self diss-satisfaction. Like the vague idea that we should be dieting or gyming for our summer body this year.
Advice is given in the form of tools to understand health, so readers can build their own plan, rather than the too-common dictation of rules to blindly follow with no apparent logic. It is scientific, intellectually rich, yet accessible to all. Importantly, the book is neither anti-pharma nor pro-pharma. There is a careful discussion that current Medicine is too prescription-happy and relatively ignorant of preventative medicine. However, there is also the acknowledgement that pharmacological interventions will have their place in Medicine of the future too.
I strongly recommend Outlive to everyone who works in the health and healing professions. Or if, like me, you want the tools and know-how to help yourself more than current Medicine can, this is a book for you.