I head to San Diego, via Mexico (relevant shortly) to catch up with one of the great health leaders of the planet, Dr. Peter Attia.
Peter is a prominent longevity physician, ketogenic diet expert, ultra-endurance athlete, crazy self-experimenter (always in the name of science!), and as of July 2018 launch, host of an outstanding new podcast called The Drive. His A-game is now all organized at PeterAttiaMD.com. Sign up for his newsletter, subscribe to The Drive podcast and digest the great “Nerd Safari” articles on his website.
Hang on for a wild ride with Peter and learn about the best way to live a long, healthy life, escape the trap of disease and dysfunction that have reached epidemic proportions today, and go off onto interesting tangents. As Peter describes on his Twitter bio, he is a man obsessed with living a passionate and intense life, whether in his career in health and medicine or his hobbies like auto racing, archery, well-chronicled dietary and fitness experiments, or trying to be a super dad to kids 10, 4 and 1.
Yes, Peter is a rare and exalted breed of chingón- Spanish for bad ass. Dropping Spanish here is appropriate because I had just returned from a Mexico vacation the night before our podcast, and with a only a couple minutes left in the interview, I suddenly became super dizzy and sweaty and had to collapse onto the couch of Peter’s guest house! After a recovery period under the watchful eye of a physician (that would be Peter) and a Nurse Practitioner (Peter's wife Jill, who arrived from the beach to discover this interesting situation), we finished the show with a perfectly-timed cameo from daughter Olivia. Now you have to listen to the whole show!
Anyway, Peter lives his life with passion and intensity – attributes sorely missing as we grow more affluent, screen-addicted, and lazy in modern society. You’ll pick up on Peter’s A-game when he goes off on motorists who mess with cyclists on the road. He relates how lost a friend from a cycling accident, so this issue understandably strikes a deep chord. I also picked up on this theme when he arrived at Peter’s house as he was having an extremely animated telephone conversation with the f-word getting lots of action. He explained that he was talking to a close business associate (Bob Kaplan, head research analyst for PeterAttiaMD.com) and how they benefit from venting to each other on occasion! In the next breath, he explained the importance of compartmentalizing and controlling emotions, relating that he would never want his kids to hear such a phone call because they are too young to understand the context.
Peter’s calling is to fight the epic battle to cure diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease. As evolutionary health enthusiasts realize, this is truly a battle against the forces of flawed and dated conventional wisdom, and manipulative marketing from big food and big pharma entities. Watch Peter’s amazing TED MED talk where he breaks down at the end, apologizing for feeling judgmental about a diabetes patient, while suggesting that we may have the story of obesity and diabetes all wrong. As Gary Taubes wrote in his book, Why We Get Fat, “obesity and sloth are not causes of obesity, they are symptoms.” What this means is that getting fat is your body’s effort to mitigate the damage caused by the disease condition of insulin resistance.
Are you with me? People who put together the one-two punch of unlucky genes and high carbohydrate dietary patterns become insulin resistant and get fat. The high insulin-producing diet messes up their appetite and fat storage hormones so that they are hungry too often, more likely to end up storing ingested calories as fat, and feel too tired to be physically active. Commanding a human to not eat when they’re hungry or to get their ass off the couch to exercise when their bloodstream is literally starved of energy, is missing the mark. In his TED MED talk, Peter draws the analogy of doctors treating