A Treasure Trove of Information and Advice

Dr. Peter Attia’s Outlive, is the mother of all books on longevity and health. He talks about the history and practice of medicine, various illnesses, their causes and treatments, metabolism and its irregularities, diet, exercise, rest, the importance of looking after your health, both physical and emotional, from a young age in order to live long and well.

Attia starts his book by saying he found it challenging to present the results of his expansive research in an accessible way to readers who are not scientifically or medically trained.

This challenge is evident throughout the book. Although Outlive is a treasure trove of information and advice on increasing both life span (how long we live) and health span (how healthy we are in the final decades of our lives), at times it gets too technical about biology and chemistry, proteins and sugars, genetics and metabolism, etc.

Despite that, there’s a lot to be learned from Outlive. Attia develops his book systematically by starting with historical advances in medicine.

He calls the medicine practiced until the 18^th century Medicine 1.0. He calls the medicine based on the scientific method, that came up with antibiotics and vaccination and is practiced now, Medicine 2.0. But he argues that although Medicine 2.0 is effective in stopping large number of deaths from communicable diseases (fast death), it is not effective in treating chronic diseases (slow death).

He calls the major chronic diseases of our times the “four horsemen”. These are: cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and type 2 diabetes. He devotes a chapter to each of these horsemen, what medicine knows about them and how far it still has to go.

Attia says Medicine 2.0 waits for the person to get sick and treats the symptoms, not the causes. But by the time we get the symptoms of the four horsemen, it’s often too late to treat them. So, he argues, in the age of chronic disease we need a new approach, which he dubs Medicine 3.0, that focuses on prevention, starting as early in life as possible.

This involves regular visits to the doctor when you’re healthy, regular tests that look for elements not included in routine blood tests and tweaking of every individual’s lifestyle according to the results of their tests. It requires discipline, perseverance and money. Even if you have the first two, cost is still an issue. Insurance companies don’t cover the costs of doctor visits or tests when the person is not sick.

In order to live the last decades of your life in better health Attia offers extensive advice, based on wide-ranging research and personal experience, in four main areas:

1. Exercise, “The most powerful longevity drug”, with three goals: cardiovascular fitness, muscle building, and stability
2. Nutrition: right nutritional biochemistry, eating pattern, amount and time for you
3. Sleep: strategies for good quality and quantity of sleep
4. Emotional health, which demands the same discipline and amount of work and financial resources as physical health

All of the above only scratches the surface of Outlive. Although Attia sometimes gets bogged down by his own athletic leanings, training and scientific minutiae, he also offers a wide perspective. For example in the chapter “The Crisis of Abundance: Can Our Ancient Genes Cope with Our Modern Diet?” he looks at the big picture of our civilization, how and why our eating habits have evolved and how they counter the basic design and needs of our bodies.

Everything considered, Outlive is a worthwhile read. It will change your views on old age, medicine and life.

Fundamental Paradigm Shift

In this transformative and thought-provoking book, The Myth of Normal – Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, renowned doctor, writer and speaker, Dr. Gabor Maté and his son, Daniel Maté turn our assumptions of our lifestyle, success, illness, medicine and healing on their head.

It’s almost impossible to summarize this monumental work. Dr. Maté talks about our 21st century lifestyle and how fraught with stress and fear it is. From the fear of losing your job to the stress of keeping it and complying with its ever-increasing demands, from the fear of climate change, war and instability, to the pressures of volatile markets, inflation and epidemics, we’re constantly under tremendous stress. This stress affects not only us, but also our young children, although they don’t realize it. Maté even goes further to say the stress that a pregnant woman goes through affects the fetus that’s growing inside her body, so most of our children are born traumatized and grow up in a stressful environment with sad, angry, resentful, scared and detached parents.

And we normalize this lifestyle. “No pain, no gain,” is an example of an often-repeated expression normalizing pain.

This childhood trauma affects young children in different ways, and they develop different coping mechanisms. Personality is only one part ingrained. It’s mostly layered on as our response to various traumas and stressors.

Another thing Maté says today’s society normalizes is our fragmented approach in medicine. If you have back pain, the doctor orders an x-ray, and anti-inflammatory medication. Acid reflux? Take this antacid. Cancer? Chemotherapy and radiation.

Our medicine treats the symptoms, not the causes. Doctors are expected to spend seven minutes per- patient visit. No wonder few, if any, look for the underlying causes of our myriad ailments. And we’ve come to accept that as normal.

Maté says despite the leaps of progress in medicine and technology, certain kinds of diseases and illnesses have proliferated in the past few decades. Examples are cancer, a variety of autoimmune disorders, ADD, autism, depression, bipolar disorder and many others. He traces them to our childhood traumas. By trauma he doesn’t mean a big accident, war, rape or violence. He means things that happened in your childhood that had a deep negative effect on you and made you feel helpless.

Being an addiction expert, Dr. Maté says all addiction, from drug and alcohol to food, work and sex is a coping mechanism with psychological needs that haven’t been met. But our society is far from understanding that and deals with addiction punitively.

Using many examples of individual patients and studies done in various countries, Maté also talks about how women, (he calls them society’s shock absorbers), blacks, natives and the poor have it way worse than men, whites, the middleclass and wealthy, when it comes to trauma, coping mechanisms or lack thereof, health hazards and life expectancy. Long term stress shortens our telomeres (the structures found at the end of our chromosomes) and as a result, our lifespan.

The scope of the book is so large that it is impossible to even enumerate everything Maté talks about. His analysis of the human psychology, how it affects epigenetics, and how we got to where we are now as a civilization, is all-encompassing.

But all is not doom and gloom in The Myth of Normal. Dr. Maté proposes a number of solutions, among them a regimen of mental exercises, which he calls Compassionate Inquiry, that the reader can undertake to peel the layers that have come to represent their façade to the world, and free themselves from patterns of behaviour dictated by their coping mechanisms developed over a lifetime.

The Myth of Normal provides a compelling new lens through which to observe our psyche, perceptions and the world, that is enlightening and paradigm shifting.