Peter Attia: Tips to improve heart health

well it's never too late um and it certainly depends on the condition um but I'll certainly give you a very extreme example and then we can extrapolate from there so we know let's start let's just talk about cardiovascular disease because it is it's like heart attacks and Str heart attacks and strokes because that's the number one cause of death globally uh and it's the number one cause of death for men and women so uh you know if you're listening to us talk today chances are this is your number one risk factor we know from autopsy study that are conducted on people in their 20s who have died for unrelated causes that they already have signs of atherosclerosis which is the technical name for what happens when cholesterol gets inside the artery wall and an inflammatory process takes place that ultimately leads to for example heart attack and this is sort of the furring up of your artery slowly over yeah and what's really happening is the the body is attacking the inside of the artery where this cholesterol gets thinking it's a foreign adversary when in reality it's not but in the process of doing so it creates more of a problem than is warranted and you're saying that when they they've done autopsies to somebody in their 20s for nothing to do with um someone who dies in a car accident car accident you can already start to see the signs of you can see evidence that this that this process has been a decade in the making in other words this process basically begins at Birth now for the average person that process probably won't reach clinical significance if you're a male until you're in your mid-60s so 50% of men who go on to have a heart attack stroke or die suddenly from one of those two will have that event take place before the time they are 65 so for women it's a third of women who will have a heart attack stroke or die of heart attack or stroke will have that occur before they are 65 so when you ask the question okay I'm in my late 40s is it too late for me well I would say no it's not right the fact that you're sitting here right tells me it's not too late to do anything about it um but where a lot of people get lulled into a false sense of security is hey I'm in my late 40s and everything looks pretty good yeah so how do we change the focus from treating diseases to preventing people become becoming sick in the first place and I guess particularly I think if you're listening to this is not just an abstract question but maybe you know for the individual themselves because I think generally they will find that if they go and see their doctor um if they're not clearly sick with something then they'll be like oh you're fine you know go away come back when you're sick yeah I mean there's two ways to think about your question and I think there's one way that I feel qualified to speak and there's one way that I don't so I'll start with the way that I don't if you're asking the question from a structural standpoint how would we fix the Health Care system and again this doesn't really matter if you're talking about the NHS or the US healthcare system or the Healthcare System anywhere in the world yeah it's the same everywhere yeah I would say to do that you have to go back to the way Physicians are trained when I was in medical school I only really learned about two tools which were procedural tools and pharmacologic tools procedural tool means like surgery Sur yeah I mean I trained as a surgeon so basically you those were the two things that you learned You Bic chop something out or you give someone a drug that's right those were your tools and again I do not want to suggest that those are not valuable tools I do not want to disparage the remarkable things that those tools have done again they have doubled our lifespan in a gener in in four generations right um I'm simply pointing out that all the stuff we're now talking about will require that you understand nutrition and you understand exercise and you understand sleep and you understand emotional health and I was not trained in any of those things and I know that my peers were not trained in any of those things so some of us have learned those things but we had to learn them outside Tim always says that um you know if you're lucky you get a half day of training on nutrition in your entire training as a doctor and probably most of the students aren't even there for that like half day on nutrition I mean even if you said okay going forward you know Physicians are going to have to spend an entire semester learning about exercise nutrition and sleep they would have to really understand how to apply those tools I don't think there's any doctor listening to this or for that matter any patient listening to this who hasn't been told by their doctor that they should sleep that they should eat less that they should exercise more but that's relatively unhelpful advice it's sort of like a patient with cancer being told by their oncologist that they should get chemotherapy I mean if the advice ended there it would be of no value right yes the reason that you see the oncologist when you have cancer is the profound Precision that goes into which chemotherapy how should it be dosed based on my body weight based on my kidney function based on my liver function how would you monitor for recurrence how would you modify the treatment if I'm not responding think of all the new on that a physician can provide today within his or her area of expertise and think about the complete and utter lack of that nuance and sophistication that goes into the primary tools of prevention and I haven't really answered your question because all I did was tell you the part that I don't know how to fix which is how do you change the medical infrastructure tell me about the but you can fix well I think the part that we can fix is where you started with which is as the individual we just have that agency to ourselves that's kind of why I wrote the book right I wanted to write a book that could be an operating manual for the person who acknowledges that maybe the system isn't perfect but what can I do to say okay like now I know a lot of this stuff and I don't need a physician for it I mean you don't need a physician to help you fix your nutrition or your exercise or your sleep or your emotional health and I think you know one of the things that um is frustrating I think is clearly we're spending almost all of our money on Health Care in this prevention regime which you know I think often some extraordinary fraction of this is spent in the last 12 months of somebody life it's sort of got too late to be able to really improve very frustrating about this yeah and in fact even if you didn't care one iota about a person's life even if you were simply counting the beans it would make so much more sense to take half of that money that is being spent in the last year or two of a person's life and spend it in the earlier part of their life and again I'm just going to use the NHS as an example because we're here but imagine if the NHS said you know what we're going to slap cgms on everybody and we're going to pay for it and you know what we're going to make sure that there are a lot of really highquality trainers out there who can work with people and get them independently working and exercising and you know what we're going to fix the system such that you know it becomes less expensive to buy high quality foods so that you know we're kind of subsidizing the right Foods instead of the wrong foods like I could go on and on it you would save money as a society and improve the quality of an individual's life it there just has to be kind of you know an inertia that has to be overcome to do that there's an enormous activation energy to make that happen

Channel: ZOE

Views: 36,957

Keywords: peter attia, peter attia longevity, peter

Id: XC9IfkNxo4c

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2024