Journal Club with Dr. Peter Attia | Metformin for Longevity & The Power of Belief Effects

Exercising is one of the most important things you're going to do to ward off insulin resistance.

The muscle is responsible for most glucose disposal; it gets glucose out of the circulation. High glucose is toxic. We have to put it away, and we want to put most of it into our muscles. That's where we store 75-80% of it.

Sleep deprivation has a profound impact on insulin resistance ... You sleep deprive people, you let them only sleep for 4 hours for a week, you'll reduce their glucose disposal by about half.

The only [glucose disposal agent] that I take is an SGL2 inhibitor. So, this is a class of drug that is used by people with type 2 diabetes, which I don't have, but because of my faith in the mechanistic studies of this drug coupled with its results in the ITP coupled with the human trial results... I think there's something very special about the drug.

What we believe about the effects of a drug, presumably, in addition to what we believe about how much we're taking and what those effects ought to be clearly are impacting at least the way that our brain reacts to those drugs.

I've been doing some dream exploration. I've had some absolutely transformative dreams for the first time in my life—one dream in particular that allowed me to feel something I've never felt before and has catalyzed a large number of important decisions in a way that no other experience, waking or sleep, has ever impacted me.

You and I sitting here with normal blood sugar have about 5g of glucose in our total circulation ... The only thing that keeps us alive is our liver's ability to titrate out glucose; and if it puts out too much... you would have type 2 diabetes. So, the difference between being metabolically healthy and having profound type 2 diabetes is 1 teaspoon of glucose in your blood stream.

Type 2 diabetes, on average, will shorten your life by 6 years.

We don't have biomarkers around true metrics of aging. Everything we have today stinks.

If you tell a group that the side effects of a drug that they're taking are evidence that the drug really works for the purpose that they're taking it, even though those side effects are kind of annoying, people report the experience as less awful, and they report more relief from the primary symptoms that they're trying to target.

The Keys paper makes it undeniably clear that in that population, there was no advantage offered by metformin that undid the disadvantage of having type 2 diabetes.