Dr. Peter Attia: Improve Vitality, Emotional & Physical Health & Lifespan

If a person has elevated triglycerides—and I consider anything over 100 to be elevated, even though most laboratory tests would consider normal to be up to 150 mg/dL—we would want to fix their insulin resistance, bring the trigs way down. I would want to see trigs no more than two times the HDL cholesterol...

If your waist circumference is more than 50% of your height, you should be concerned.

If your objective is to not die from heart disease and only to die with it, then you want ApoB as low as possible ... The longer you wait to start doing something about this, the more aggressively you need to do something about it.

If I knew everything then that I know today, I would have had [my ApoB] measured in my 20s. I didn't get my ApoB measured for the first time probably till I was in my 40s.

Do not get a CT scan or any imaging study without asking, 'How much radiation am I seeing?' And if a person can't tell you how many millisieverts of radiation you're being exposed to, then just say, 'I'm going to wait a minute until somebody can tell me that.

The unequivocally true things for brain health are sleep matters. Another unequivocally true thing for brain health is that lower LDL cholesterol and ApoB is better than higher. Another thing that is unequivocally true is not having type 2 diabetes matters.

I can certainly tell you that there's no reason to believe that smoking cannabis is somehow better than smoking cigarettes, but the dose seems to be significantly lower.

I want to be clear: I don't think vaping is a good idea ... The only advantage I could see to vaping was if it was the only way a person would stop smoking.

Sometimes people would benefit to imagine what the surface area of the lung is. If you took the alveolar air sacs of the lungs and spread them out, you would easily cover a tennis court ... Any time you inhale something, your body is so adept at absorbing it...

Every man will die with prostate cancer and some will die from it. You and I have prostate cancer right now.

95+ percent of cancers are not arising from germline mutations; they are arising from somatic mutations, or acquired mutations. So, the question then becomes what is driving somatic mutation? And the two clearest indications of drivers of somatic mutation are smoking and obesity.

I did a little analysis, actually, the other day, when I looked at how are deaths of despair increasing over the 5 years? So, what did I define as a death of despair? Suicide, alcohol-related death or overdose (accidental overdose) ... That number is going up at almost 20% per year since 2019.

"If you hold yourself up to this goal of I have to be perfect... you're going to set yourself up for failure because you're not going to be perfect. But, if instead, you can say, what I'm going to be perfect about is repairing damage when I cause it, that's what matters.

There are too many people walking around with high blood pressure who don't know it ... Your blood pressure is virtually never measured correctly in the doctor's office.

The short answer is there is no dose of ethanol that is healthy. I would argue that it's not a straight line of risk, but it probably goes, I think, from 0 to 1 ... Up to one [drink] per day, it's probably very difficult to discern the harm.

With each subsequent blood pressure trial, the data are becoming clearer and clearer that the more aggressively you manage blood pressure to be within the 120 over 80 range, the better.

Put it this way, somewhere between 1 and 3 and 1 in 4 chance anyone listening to this or watching this is going to get cancer in heir lifetime.

Prostate cancer, colon cancer are cancers that no one should ever die from because they are so easy to screen for. They are so easy to treat when they are in their infancy. It's totally unacceptable that people are dying from this.

Colon cancer is not just the third leading cause of cancer death; it's 100% preventable. Why? Because every colon cancer comes from a polyp, and every polyp can be seen on a colonoscopy.

If you're over 65 and you fall and break your femur or hip... your 12-month mortality, the probability you will be dead in 12 months after that break if you're 65 or older, depending on the study, is about 15-30%.

Infinite lifespan, if you're miserable, means nothing.

Your inner monologue is so frequent and ubiquitous and present that it's easy to almost forget that it's there.

The kidney is so sensitive to blood pressure. This is a tiny organ that on every pump of your heart is getting 20-25% of your blood, so just imagine how sensitive and susceptible it is to elevated blood pressure.