August 26, 2023
1. There are no footnotes in the body of the text. The reader has to guess there will be a note, turn to the back of the book and search the note section by page number and then by the sentence to see if there is one. Weird, especially considering how Attia tries to emphasis his reliance on science and numbers.
2. The actual important/useable information could have been distilled down to a 20-30 page pamphlet with footnotes to relevant studies. The rest is anecdotes, analogies and Attia’s personal opinions.
3. The book is not formatted in a way where the usable info is easy to spot and go back to for later reference. It sucks having to wade through 400 pages of fluff material.
4. The final section on emotional health is about Attia’s struggle to overcome being an asshole that segues in to a mention of DBT as a way to make this section fit in to the book.
Yet, if Attia had just written a book on this topic alone and the research and data behind the treatment and success rates, it would be an excellent book.
5. There is no information in the book that can’t easily be found online for free.
6. The book feels like it was written initially as a stream of thought and someone else was tasked to edit it in to some kind of organized format.
7. Attia’s reliance on extreme monitoring of his patients bloodwork, glucose, etc feels like a grift. If you run enough tests on people you will eventually find some result outside the range of “normal”. That doesn’t mean anything is wrong. His assumption that if lowering a value to x is good, then x/2 must be better could actually be quite wrong.
8. Attia mentions centenarians but never seems to address the fact that these people lived to these ages without the kind of extreme monitoring or regimens he proposes.
This issue is probably the one that is my deal breaker with all longevity experts. My grandparents lived to 90, 102, 100 and 96. Some smoked, some drank, none ran, none lifted weights and none went to therapy. One was even in the Bikini Islands within the strike zone for the Castle Project explosions. I have to believe a huge part of their longevity is due to genes. Which ones? Who knows. So what parts of their environment was the other factors that lead to their longevity?
Instead of focusing on making people guinea pigs of what ones hopes are longevity regimens, perhaps a better focus would be on super seniors and researching what about them genetically, their diets or their habits is setting them apart from the average.
2. The actual important/useable information could have been distilled down to a 20-30 page pamphlet with footnotes to relevant studies. The rest is anecdotes, analogies and Attia’s personal opinions.
3. The book is not formatted in a way where the usable info is easy to spot and go back to for later reference. It sucks having to wade through 400 pages of fluff material.
4. The final section on emotional health is about Attia’s struggle to overcome being an asshole that segues in to a mention of DBT as a way to make this section fit in to the book.
Yet, if Attia had just written a book on this topic alone and the research and data behind the treatment and success rates, it would be an excellent book.
5. There is no information in the book that can’t easily be found online for free.
6. The book feels like it was written initially as a stream of thought and someone else was tasked to edit it in to some kind of organized format.
7. Attia’s reliance on extreme monitoring of his patients bloodwork, glucose, etc feels like a grift. If you run enough tests on people you will eventually find some result outside the range of “normal”. That doesn’t mean anything is wrong. His assumption that if lowering a value to x is good, then x/2 must be better could actually be quite wrong.
8. Attia mentions centenarians but never seems to address the fact that these people lived to these ages without the kind of extreme monitoring or regimens he proposes.
This issue is probably the one that is my deal breaker with all longevity experts. My grandparents lived to 90, 102, 100 and 96. Some smoked, some drank, none ran, none lifted weights and none went to therapy. One was even in the Bikini Islands within the strike zone for the Castle Project explosions. I have to believe a huge part of their longevity is due to genes. Which ones? Who knows. So what parts of their environment was the other factors that lead to their longevity?
Instead of focusing on making people guinea pigs of what ones hopes are longevity regimens, perhaps a better focus would be on super seniors and researching what about them genetically, their diets or their habits is setting them apart from the average.