Honestly, you have to be in the top 1% (0.5%?) of income generation to be able to afford Dr. Attia’s fees of $150,000+ USD a year. Most people would prefer to read his book, browse this forum and hire a personal fitness coach (and a dietician if inclined) for similar results at a much more reasonable price.
When I look at the bill for my supplement stack, I am quite shocked (impressed?) by how much the costs add up! A normal middle-class individual would never pay for it.
However, most individuals in the bottom 90% of income generation would scoff at spending more than the cost of a daily multivitamin (and maybe Omega 3s) on preventative medicine. They’ve bought into the mythology that supplements equal expensive excrement. Heck, buying organic vegetables is a luxury for most.
And then there’s the Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, candy, potato chips crowd…
There are many many many distinct individuals with their own distinct ideas on life. I am glad to find like-minded individuals here. Thanks, everyone for helping me realize I am not alone in wanting good preventative health options.
True - but Peter Attia is pretty focused on the healthspan optimization aspects of medical care - which is very different from most primary care physicians. And he has a team of PHDs who review the relevant research to help them stay on top of the knowledge base. This is very different from some doctor who just fufils his basic CME requirements.
It’s incredibly difficult to find a doctor that will consider PA’s brand of aggressive prevention. It’s true that we can DIY a lot of it, ordering rapamycin from India and using online services to order blood tests that our primary doctors say are pointless and a sign of medical anxiety. But for people who have more money than time, I can see why they gladly sign up for someone who will take care of all the details and just tell them what to, test what needs testing, and make a plan for them.
What advice in particular Dr. Attia or Dr. Stanfield give is supposed to be wrong?
I don’t know Luigi Fontana, but how does his advice differ from them?
He has experience as a clinician but he is also a respected and prominent researcher in metabolism.
He does not advocate for higher protein in general or even in the elderly. He cites the calorie restricted lab animals that eat fewer calories and less protein and yet do better in the frailty indices compared to ad libitum animals. He also respects epidemiology. Most of these pro-high protein pro-animal food people throw the entirety of epidemiology out the window.
He doesn’t push veganism but suggests drastically reducing consumption of animal foods. He has expressed concern for the health of the biosphere and I suspect he is pretty close to veganism, even if he won’t admit it.
He cites the calorie restricted lab animals that eat fewer calories and less protein and yet do better in the frailty indices compared to ad libitum animals.
When you ignore human studies in favor of mice studies, you are doing something wrong. Lack of protein in older adult humans leads to fraility and death.
I don’t think you watched the videos or read the studies that influenced him but you reacted to a sentence that I extracted from the video.
You assume that RDA is inadequate although it is at least two standard deviations above what 97.5% of the studied population requires.
Exercise is required to stave off sarcopenia. In elderly humans sarcopenia is generally accompanied by obesity and metabolic syndrome. Putting more protein in the diet, but not exercise, is not going to help these people.
Exercise by itself is often not enough. Only when it is accompanied by sufficient protein intake does muscle mass increase with training. Dr. Attia went over this in his book. For the general exercising population, 1.63g/kg of protein is recommended while for older adults he recommends going above 2g/kg.
There are no longevity populations known for eating like this.
If you could find a group of centenarians who ate like this, I’d eat my entire straw hat population.
They just make this stuff up because they can’t give up their meat and they associate excess muscle mass with their masculinity, and so many people just eat that up. Also I suspect that their personal ideas of what constitutes frailty differ from what a clinician might think about frailty.
Everyone wants to think that rich (and often, fatty) foods are good for them and lots of people think that having 30 lbs of extra muscle is extra healthy.
Nobody wants to eat like the Okinwans that actually passed 100 (with good documentation). But that’s probably closer to what will bring us to 100 in an active, disease-free, fully-functional state than what Attia et al. propose. Like I wrote before, he writes what people want to hear. If he told them to eat seaweed, collard greens, and a little bit of tofu instead of steak, nobody would want to throw $150K/year at him.
Peter Attia often discusses protein intake with Matt Kaeberlein, who has credentials at least equal to Fontana, and Kaeberlein expresses the same views as Attia and backs up his views with references to scientific studies.
So we have two essentially opposite views held by “experts” on protein intake. You have Fontana and Valter Long, etc who are essentially anti-protein and recommend extremely low levels of intake . You have Attia, Matt Kaeberlein, and a few others who believe it very beneficial and recommend very high intake levels, roughly 3 times as high as the low protein people.
It is sad that there can be such vast diffferences in the advice given by various experts on the subject.
You are right and I don’t put too much weight on mice, rats, or nematode studies.
My own observation from many studies that I have looked at is: Humans seem to do well on a variety of diets. Absolutely the only thing proven to extend life span before the advent of rapamycin was calorie restriction and nothing else. That is why I believe diet is not as important as calorie restriction and maintaining a normal BMI. Of course, different people need different diets depending on things like diabetes, etc.
I personally have been gravitating back to a fairly strict keto, heavily carnivore-weighted, diet because that is when I felt the best in the past and for me, it seems to be what my digestive tract likes the best.
It depends on what you consider an “expert” and “field.” If you restrict yourself to clinicians with a huge body of work on humans including several clinical or randomized controlled trials, people who do not dismiss epidemiology, it’s a different picture.
I’ll give Kaeberlein his expertise on rapamycin. But he does not have the experience with humans that Fontana and Longo do.
