#661: Dr. Peter Attia The Science and Art of Longevity

I would personally just say there's gotta be an insane reason to have more than 2 drinks in a day ... And it's got to be a really good reason to drink on more than 3 days a week. So, in the back of my mind, I'm keeping a tally, which is I really shouldn't be having more than about 7 drinks in a week.

There's really nothing that's within the zip code of those two metrics. Having very, very high VO2 max for your age & sex and being very strong, they have more of a positive impact than any single thing we can think of has a negative impact—and that includes having end-stage renal disease... being a smoker, having high blood pressure, having type 2 diabetes, being obese. The downside of those things is relatively small compared to the upside of having a high VO2 max and being very strong.

When it comes to VO2 max, you basically have to be in the 3-8 minute range ... So, 3 minutes at the low end, meaning you're doing something that is so hard you can do it for about 3 minutes. And at the high end, 8 minutes. If you can do it for more than 8 minutes, it's not doing a lot for your VO2 max.

Two 90-gram boluses of protein doesn't accomplish nearly the same thing as four 45-gram servings spread out over the course of a day.

If you focus on the number of grams of leucine, lysine, and methionine you're getting in a given meal or a given day; that will almost assuredly get your total protein quantity to the right place ... I just wanted to make sure I was getting, gosh, probably 6-8g of leucine, add a comparable amount of lysine, at least 2g of methionine a day.

Despite what a lot of the epidemiology will tell people, alcohol is not good for you in any dose ... If I drink something that doesn't taste incredible, I pour it out. I'm never going to tolerate a bad glass of wine, ever. It's just not worth it.

The key for building a high VO2 max is saying I'm going to spend about 80% of my aerobic training time in zone 2. And this is counter-intuitive ... You have to, first and foremost, build that huge aerobic base. That is the pyramid that allows you to make the peak higher.

I can nasally breathe when I'm doing zone 2, but I'm right at the limits of what I can do ... If you can talk pretty easily while you're doing it—like if you're out on a walk, and you're talking to somebody—that's too easy. If you can't talk at all, that's too har. And I think that is, by far, the best test.

If you take two people who don't have diabetes, one of whom has a hemoglobin A1c of 5.0. and one of whom has a hemoglobin A1c of 6.0—neither of them are diabetic—is there any difference in their outcomes? ... For a non-diabetic population, the lower the average blood glucose as estimated by hemoglobin A1c, the lower the all-cause mortality.

If you want to live a longer better life, you have to have a strategy in place for maintaining type II fibers—and you're not going to get that without resistance. You can't say, 'Look, I play tennis every day. I walk every day.' Those things are great; they're not doing something for your II fibers.

I use 55-60 pounds, and I'll typically do an hour ruck ... Going up the hills, I'm going hard. I'm really pushing my cardio up the hills. And I'm trying to find the steepest hills possible to come down, because that's working that huge eccentric gear.

I'm just 50-yeas-old ... I'm 3 colonoscopies in at 50 ... Just as it's unacceptable, I think, to die of cardiovascular disease in the year 2023, I think it's unacceptable to die of colon cancer—and colon cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death.

Longevity without healthspan is the greatest curse in the world. To live a long life and to suffer is not to live.

I was shocked at how much less muscle I had than 10 years earlier ... I attribute it to several things, but I really thought that chief among them was just how much fasting I had been doing over the previous 3 years. I had really kind of taken fasting to a pretty extreme place.

There's nothing that will demonstrate to a person how much late-night food and alcohol are ruining their sleep than a sleep tracker.

We would like to see our patients carry half their body weight in each hand for a minute. So, walk around with half your body weight in each hand for a minute ... Having strong hands is one of the most correlated findings with longevity.

The RPE is you should be able to talk, but you don't want to. So today, I did a zone 2 ride... I spent the entire zone 2 on a phone call ... There was absolutely no confusion on the part of the guy on the other end of that line that I was on my bike and that I wanted him to talk more than me.

The protein basically went to a very conscious and concerted effort to increase protein to 1 gram per pound of body weight.

You have to have enough protein in a given serving that you don't just have the liver take it and use its bit for gluconeogenesis. At the same time, you don't want to have too much ... My best reading of the literature is that you're starting to hit too much at about 50g in a serving.

Am I getting [protein] from plant or animal? ... There's really no ambiguity here: Protein derived from animal sources are more bioavailable.

If you're really interested in preventing heart disease—which, by the way, number one cause of death in men and women in the United States and in the world ... For every woman who dies of breast cancer, there's like 8-12 women who are dying of heart disease. So, pink ribbons matter; red ribbons matter more.

People are getting, probably, at least some people, overly anxious about what their sleep trackers are telling them ... The pendulum has sort of swung a little too far to the other side ... Now you've got a class of people—me among them—who maybe think too much about sleep.

I really have to make sure that that drinking is a good 3 hours away from sleep.

I want to make sure that I can do a standing broad jump that's higher than my height laying down. So, if I'm 5 foot 10, I want to make sure I'm jumping at least 6 feet on a broad jump. And a broad jump's a really interesting test. It's a profoundly extreme example of concentric and eccentric strength in the same movement.