Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“Probably the most important books you’ll ever read.”—Steven D. Levitt, New York Times bestselling creator of Freakonomics

Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.

For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill the general public: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too incessantly, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we will have to replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, quite than waiting.

This is not “biohacking,” it’s science: a well-founded strategic and tactical approach to extending lifespan even as also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Attia’s aim is less to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health, in order to create the best plan for you as an individual. In Outlive, readers will discover:

• Why the cholesterol test at your annual physical doesn’t tell you enough about your actual risk of dying from a heart attack.
• That you may already suffer from an extremely common yet underdiagnosed liver condition that could be a precursor to the chronic diseases of aging.
• Why exercise is the most potent pro-longevity “drug”—and how to begin training for the “Centenarian Decathlon.”
• Why you will have to fail to remember about diets, and focus instead on nutritional biochemistry, using technology and data to personalize your eating pattern.
• Why striving for physical health and longevity, but ignoring emotional health, could be the ultimate curse of all.

Aging and longevity are far more malleable than we think; our fate is not set in stone. With the right roadmap, you’ll be able to plot a different path for your life, one that allows you to outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before.