#872 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientists Masterclass On Longevity

Having a decent amount of muscle has secondary health effects for the rest of your system. Muscle is a glucose consumer, and it keeps your blood glucose chronically lower than if you didn't have plenty of muscle—and excessive chronic high blood glucose is a surefire way to just croak fucking early. That's it.

If you're doing a lot fewer than five or six thousand steps per day all the time, and you don't get a lot of physical activity otherwise, you could be living longer if you did more physical activity in most cases.

The best way to know if it's time to start grinding again? You start getting itchy for the shit again. Not compulsively, like you want it again; you want some stress. You feel like a lazy asshole, and you're way beyond relaxed. If you haven't even gotten relaxed yet, you need more vacation.

In 2024, if someone's selling you longevity supplements, they could be on to something and there could be some valuable stuff people have in the formulations that actually works but nothing that we can be ultra super sure about.

In the developing world, environment has really big effects on longevity. Still one of the top killers, straight up, all around the world is indoor air quality.

Generally a moderate to high amount of physical activity has a good combination of promoting the longest lifespan and the longest healthspan.

It's difficult to reduce both your longevity, how long you live, your lifespan, and wildly increase your morbidity in a more dependable way than being severely overweight.

If you weigh 400 pounds, and you trot out the genetics bullshit to me of why you haven't lost weigh... You can really do unbelievable damage and shorten your life substantially. It kind of doesn't matter where your genetics are at that point.

There are no doubt genetic variables about a person that, under the hood, cause them to live a long time or live a short time.

If you never have challenging times in your life—times where the best of you is required, times when you have to focus, times in which you struggle, both mentally and physically—you're unlikely to have as high of a quality of life and, by a little bit, as high of a duration of life as if you have times of life that require you to get tired and beat up and stressed and overwhelmed.

People who are passionately engaged in one or multiple sequential or overlapping lifetime pursuits seem to outlive most other people.

Family, friends, community involvement are very tightly correlated with your longevity.