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 Physician
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, 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, focusing on 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]

Personal life

Attia resides in the Austin, Texas, area with his wife and three children. [16] He swam across the channel between Santa Catalina Island and Los Angeles. He is the 120th person to achieve this feat. [17]

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 in which excess body fat harms health

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.

Fasting is the abstention from eating and sometimes drinking. 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">Mediterranean diet</span> Diet inspired by the Mediterranean region

The Mediterranean diet is a diet inspired by the eating habits and traditional food typical of southern Spain, southern Italy, and Crete, 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. Plant-based diets encompass 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 and seeds. They do not need to be vegan or vegetarian, but are defined in terms of low frequency of animal food consumption.

<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 films, including in Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), 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> 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Weight management</span> Techniques for maintaining body weight

Weight management refers to behaviors, techniques, and physiological processes that contribute to a person's ability to attain and maintain a healthy weight. Most weight management techniques encompass long-term lifestyle strategies that promote healthy eating and daily physical activity. Moreover, weight management involves developing meaningful ways to track weight over time and to identify the ideal body weights for different individuals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Lustig</span> Endocrinologist, professor

Robert H. Lustig is an American pediatric endocrinologist. He is Professor emeritus of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he specialized in neuroendocrinology and childhood obesity. He is also director of UCSF's WATCH program, and president and co-founder of the non-profit Institute for Responsible Nutrition.

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">Luigi Fontana (medical researcher)</span> Italian/Australian physician scientist, professor, environmentalist and author

Luigi Fontana, M.D., PhD, FRACP is a physician scientist who studies healthy longevity, with a focus on calorie restriction, endurance exercise and metabolism. He is the Leonard P Ullmann Chair in Translational Metabolic Health at the Charles Perkins Centre, where he directs the Charles Perkins Centre Royal Prince Alfred Clinic and the CPC RPA Health for Life Research, Educational and Clinical Program. He is also a Professor of Medicine and Nutrition in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney and a Clinical Academic in the Department of Endocrinology at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Australia. Fontana was a professor of medicine and co-Director of the Healthy Longevity Program at Washington University School of 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.

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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  2. Machell, Ben (9 June 2023). "How to stay fit over 60? 9 changes to make now". The Times of London . Retrieved 24 August 2023.
  3. Rainey, James (18 October 2015). "30,000 strokes to go". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 31 October 2018.
  4. "Peter Attia, MD | Penguin Random House".
  5. Husten, Larry. "A Manhattan Project To End The Obesity Epidemic". forbes.com. Retrieved 31 October 2018.
  6. "Peter Attia Bio: A Deep Dive into the Life and Achievements of the Longevity Expert". podcastmentions.com. Retrieved 30 July 2023.
  7. Szokan, Nancy (25 August 2014). "Is it what we eat? Or that we overeat? A look at the effort to figure out why we're fat". washingtonpost.com. Retrieved 31 October 2018.
  8. "What Makes You So Smart, Peter Attia? Pacific Standard". psmag.com. 25 August 2014. Retrieved 31 October 2018.
  9. O'Connor, Anahad (12 July 2013). "Blaming the Patient, Then Asking Forgiveness". nytimes.com. Retrieved 24 August 2023.
  10. Munro, Dan (24 April 2018). "Are We Fighting The Wrong Battle In The Obesity War?". forbes.com. Retrieved 31 October 2018.
  11. "Attia P. TED: Is the Obesity Crisis Hiding a Bigger Problem?". ted.com. 24 April 2018. Retrieved 24 August 2023.
  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)
  13. "Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity - New Book by Peter Attia". Peter Attia. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  14. 1 2 Marchese, David (21 May 2023). "Want to Live Longer and Healthier? Peter Attia Has a Plan". The New York Times . Retrieved 22 May 2023.
  15. "Amazon Charts: Week of August 20, 2023". Amazon.com . Retrieved 24 August 2023.
  16. "About Peter - Peter Attia". Peterattiamd.com. Retrieved 30 July 2023.
  17. Rainey, James (18 October 2005). "30,000 strokes to go". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 11 July 2023.