Outlive, by Dr. Peter Attia

I opened this book with some trepidation, almost annoyance. Here comes another tome to legitimize a pod-guru's personal brand. Just give me the Cliff notes, I thought. But what I didn't anticipate was how interesting the background science would be. Dr. Attia begins by saying that other people that claim people can actually live longer is selling a line of goods. Mostly snake oil. The way that our cells break down, no one is going to be living to 200 or whatever. What he's really interested in is not longevity per say, but the quality of your life while you're living it. What he's talking about is Healthspan vs. Lifesapan. He even has a helpful graph that shows with a x-axis line that stays more bulbously elevated for longer with a steep drop off that visually describes the goal of keeping your mental faculties and physical mobility for longer. 

The other theme he seeds early on is medicine 2.0 vs. 3.0 with medicine 2.0 basically treating the sickness and prolonging a life of misery, while "medicine 3.0" gets ahead of the game and is healthy based and preventive. Thinks ahead, rather than forecast, it back-casts - what do you want the last ten years of your life to look like? In a catching chapter in which they analyze the habits and DNA of a collection of people that reached their 100th year, he asks, what does it take to win the Centenarian Olympics? 

How do we avoid what he calls the four horsemen - Diabetes, Heart Disease, Cancer and Dementia and   - the four things that Centenarians seem to be able to put off for 10, 20 years or in fact, avoid altogether. And then he goes into each of the four horsemen, chapter by chapter. 

But they're basically all related. In fact, having messed up blood glucose due to ingesting too much fructose not only directly to type two diabetes, it contributes to heart disease, cancer and dementia. 

He told the story of doing an operation where a guy that didn't drink still had a fatty liver on the verge of cirrhosis - basically because he drank 10 cokes a day. 

He really breaks down how our modern diet is to sugar heavy, and our bodies don't know what to do with it. We need to have sub-cutaneous fat, but when those reserves are full, the body starts storing fat elsewhere. And when it gets trained to do that, 

Type 2 Diabetes. Interestingly, it's a little more complicated than "eating fat" = fat in my blood. "good" cholesterol v "bad" cholesterol. It's more about training your body to burn fat.