Peter Attia

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Peter Attia
Peter Attia at Ancestral Health Symposium.jpg
Attia in 2013
Born (1973-03-19) March 19, 1973 (age 51) [1]
Alma mater Queen's University (BS)
Stanford University (MD)
Occupation(s) Physician and Author
Website peterattiamd.com

Peter Attia (born March 19, 1973) [1] is a Canadian-American author, physician, and researcher known for his work in longevity medicine.

Contents

Early life and education

Attia was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is the child of Coptic Egyptian immigrant parents. [2] He graduated from Queen's University at Kingston in 1996 with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. He then attended Stanford University School of Medicine, graduating in 2001 with a Doctor of Medicine.

Career

From 2001 to 2006, Attia began a residency in general surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, but never completed his residency, nor completed a fellowship or became board certified. [3] During this time, he also undertook research at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, investigating cancer immunotherapy for melanoma. [4]

After dropping out of his residency program, Attia joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in the Palo Alto office as a member of the Corporate Risk Practice and Healthcare Practice. [5] In 2014 he founded a private clinic dedicated to longevity medicine. [6] Attia also created the blog "The Eating Academy" (later "War on Insulin" and now peterattiamd.com) that mostly focuses on topics related to nutrition, physical activity, and longevity. Subsequently, he launched the podcast "The Peter Attia Drive", in which he interviews various experts each week, covering topics such as longevity, metabolic health, and medical research.

In 2012, Attia co-founded the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), with Gary Taubes, with a primary focus on promoting nutrition research and tackling the growing health challenges linked to obesity, diabetes, and metabolic diseases. [7] [8] In 2013 Attia was a speaker at TEDMED, where he shared insights on longevity. [9] [10] [11] Attia has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss's book Tools of Titans . He had a central role in Limitless, a six-part documentary for National Geographic and Disney+ starring Chris Hemsworth and directed by Darren Aronofsky. In episode 5, Attia told Hemsworth that he carried the high-risk APOE4 allele, which places him at elevated risk of neurodegenerative aging of the Alzheimer's type. [12]

On March 28, 2023, Attia (with coauthor Bill Gifford) published his book Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity. [13] According to The New York Times Magazine, the book "has been a runaway best seller since it was published this spring [of 2023]"; [14] it was No. 3 on the Amazon Charts for nonfiction as of August 24, 2023. [15] [14] Attia was named in Time 2024 list of influential people in health. [16]

Personal life

Attia resides in the Austin, Texas, area with his wife and three children. [17] He swam across the channel between Santa Catalina Island and Los Angeles. He is the 120th person to achieve this feat. [18]

Related Research Articles

Dieting is the practice of eating food in a regulated way to decrease, maintain, or increase body weight, or to prevent and treat diseases such as diabetes and obesity. As weight loss depends on calorie intake, different kinds of calorie-reduced diets, such as those emphasising particular macronutrients, have been shown to be no more effective than one another. As weight regain is common, diet success is best predicted by long-term adherence. Regardless, the outcome of a diet can vary widely depending on the individual.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metabolic syndrome</span> Medical condition

Metabolic syndrome is a clustering of at least three of the following five medical conditions: abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high serum triglycerides, and low serum high-density lipoprotein (HDL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abdominal obesity</span> Excess fat around the stomach and abdomen

Abdominal obesity, also known as central obesity and truncal obesity, is the human condition of an excessive concentration of visceral fat around the stomach and abdomen to such an extent that it is likely to harm its bearer's health. Abdominal obesity has been strongly linked to cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, and other metabolic and vascular diseases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Obesity</span> Medical condition of excess body fat

Obesity is a medical condition, sometimes considered a disease, in which excess body fat has accumulated to such an extent that it can potentially have negative effects on health. People are classified as obese when their body mass index (BMI)—a person's weight divided by the square of the person's height—is over 30 kg/m2; the range 25–30 kg/m2 is defined as overweight. Some East Asian countries use lower values to calculate obesity. Obesity is a major cause of disability and is correlated with various diseases and conditions, particularly cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, certain types of cancer, and osteoarthritis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fasting</span> Willing abstinence from, or reduced consumption of, food and/or drink

Fasting is the act of refraining from eating, and sometimes drinking. However, from a purely physiological context, "fasting" may refer to the metabolic status of a person who has not eaten overnight, or to the metabolic state achieved after complete digestion and absorption of a meal. Metabolic changes in the fasting state begin after absorption of a meal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lifestyle disease</span> Diseases linked with the way people live their life

Lifestyle diseases can be defined as the diseases linked to the manner in which a person lives their life. These diseases are non-communicable, and can be caused by lack of physical activity, unhealthy eating, alcohol, substance use disorders and smoking tobacco, which can lead to heart disease, stroke, obesity, type II diabetes and lung cancer. The diseases that appear to increase in frequency as countries become more industrialized and people live longer include Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, atherosclerosis, asthma, cancer, chronic liver disease or cirrhosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, chronic kidney failure, osteoporosis, PCOD, stroke, depression, obesity and vascular dementia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mediterranean diet</span> Diet inspired by the Mediterranean region

The Mediterranean diet is a concept first invented in 1975 by the American biologist Ancel Keys and chemist Margaret Keys. The diet took inspiration from the eating habits and traditional food typical of Crete, much of the rest of Greece, and southern Italy, and formulated in the early 1960s. It is distinct from Mediterranean cuisine, which covers the actual cuisines of the Mediterranean countries, and from the Atlantic diet of northwestern Spain and Portugal. While inspired by a specific time and place, the "Mediterranean diet" was later refined based on the results of multiple scientific studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plant-based diet</span> Diet consisting mostly or entirely of plant-based foods

A plant-based diet is a diet consisting mostly or entirely of plant-based foods. It encompasses a wide range of dietary patterns that contain low amounts of animal products and high amounts of fiber-rich plant products such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, herbs, and spices. Plant-based diets may also be vegan or vegetarian but do not have to be, as they are defined in terms of high frequency of plants and low frequency of animal food consumption.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neal D. Barnard</span> American physician, author, and clinical researcher

Neal D. Barnard is an American animal rights activist, physician and founding president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). Barnard has authored books advocating a whole food plant-based dietary eating pattern.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Hemsworth</span> Australian actor (born 1983)

Christopher Hemsworth is an Australian actor. He rose to prominence playing Kim Hyde in the Australian television series Home and Away (2004–2007) before beginning a film career in Hollywood. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Hemsworth starred as Thor in the 2011 film of the same name and reprised the role in several subsequent installments, which established him among the world's highest-paid actors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diseases of affluence</span> Health conditions thought to be a result of increasing wealth in society

Diseases of affluence, previously called diseases of rich people, is a term sometimes given to selected diseases and other health conditions which are commonly thought to be a result of increasing wealth in a society. Also referred to as the "Western disease" paradigm, these diseases are in contrast to "diseases of poverty", which largely result from and contribute to human impoverishment. These diseases of affluence have vastly increased in prevalence since the end of World War II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Healthy diet</span> Type of diet

A healthy diet is a diet that maintains or improves overall health. A healthy diet provides the body with essential nutrition: fluid, macronutrients such as protein, micronutrients such as vitamins, and adequate fibre and food energy.

Nutritional genomics, also known as nutrigenomics, is a science studying the relationship between human genome, human nutrition and health. People in the field work toward developing an understanding of how the whole body responds to a food via systems biology, as well as single gene/single food compound relationships. Nutritional genomics or Nutrigenomics is the relation between food and inherited genes, it was first expressed in 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Taubes</span> American science writer (born 1956)

Gary Taubes is an American journalist, writer, and low-carbohydrate / high-fat (LCHF) diet advocate. His central claim is that carbohydrates, especially sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, overstimulate the secretion of insulin, causing the body to store fat in fat cells and the liver, and that it is primarily a high level of dietary carbohydrate consumption that accounts for obesity and other metabolic syndrome conditions. He is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987); Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993); Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), titled The Diet Delusion (2008) in the UK and Australia; Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (2010); The Case Against Sugar (2016); and The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating (2020). Taubes's work often goes against accepted scientific, governmental, and popular tenets such as that obesity is caused by eating too much and exercising too little and that excessive consumption of fat, especially saturated fat in animal products, leads to cardiovascular disease.

Intermittent fasting is any of various meal timing schedules that cycle between voluntary fasting and non-fasting over a given period. Methods of intermittent fasting include alternate-day fasting, periodic fasting, such as the 5:2 diet, and daily time-restricted eating.

Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh is a US American physician doing research in nephrology, kidney dialysis, nutrition, and epidemiology. He is best known as a specialist in kidney disease nutrition and chronic kidney disease and for his hypothesis about the longevity of individuals with chronic disease states, also known as reverse epidemiology including obesity paradox. According to this hypothesis, obesity or hypercholesterolemia may counterintuitively be protective and associated with greater survival in certain groups of people, such as elderly individuals, dialysis patients, or those with chronic disease states and wasting syndrome (cachexia), whereas normal to low body mass index or normal values of serum cholesterol may be detrimental and associated with worse mortality. Kalantar-Zadeh is also known for his expertise in kidney dialysis therapy, including incremental dialysis, as well as renal nutrition. He is the brother of Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh, who is an Australian scientist involved in research in the fields of materials sciences, nanotechnology, and transducers.

Obesity medicine is a field of medicine dedicated to the comprehensive treatment of patients with obesity. Obesity medicine takes into account the multi-factorial etiology of obesity in which behavior, development, environment, epigenetic, genetic, nutrition, physiology, and psychosocial contributors all play a role. As time progresses, we become more knowledgeable about the complexity of obesity, and we have ascertained that there is a certain skill set and knowledge base that is required to treat this patient population. Clinicians in the field should understand how a myriad of factors contribute to obesity including: gut microbiota diversity, regulation of food intake and energy balance through enteroendocrine and neuroregulation, and adipokine physiology. Obesity medicine physicians should be skilled in identifying factors which have contributed to obesity and know how to employ methods to treat obesity. No two people with obesity are alike, and it is important to approach each patient as an individual to determine which factors contributed to their obesity in order to effectively treat each patient. Physicians specializing in obesity medicine may choose to obtain board certification by the American Board of Obesity Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anoop Misra</span> Indian endocrinologist

Anoop Misra is an Indian endocrinologist and a former honorary physician to the Prime Minister of India. He is the chairman of Fortis Centre for Diabetes, Obesity and Cholesterol (C-DOC) and heads, National Diabetes Obesity and Cholesterol Foundation (NDOC). A former Fellow of the World Health Organization at the Royal Free Hospital, UK, Misra is a recipient of the Dr. B. C. Roy Award, the highest Indian award in the medical category. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri, in 2007, for his contributions to Indian medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semaglutide</span> Anti-diabetic and anti-obesity medication

Semaglutide is an antidiabetic medication used for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and an anti-obesity medication used for long-term weight management. It is a peptide similar to the hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), modified with a side chain. It can be administered by subcutaneous injection or taken orally. It is sold under the brand names Ozempic and Rybelsus for diabetes, and under the brand name Wegovy for weight loss.

Rachel Louise Batterham is a British physician who is a professor of Obesity, Diabetes and Endocrinology at University College London. She established the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Bariatric Centre for Weight Management and Metabolic Surgery. She has extensively studied obesity, and has contributed to clinical management and the understanding of obesity-related diseases.

References

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  12. Angeline Jane Bernabe, Madison Marmen, Matthew Yahata (17 November 2022). "Chris Hemsworth discovers he may be at risk for Alzheimer's disease in new series, 'Limitless'". Good Morning America . ABC News . Retrieved 28 March 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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