The Peter Attia Drive - March 23, 2026


#385 - AMA #82： Applying the tools of longevity in the real world： disease prevention, DEXA scans, artificial sweeteners, injury recovery, stability training, habit formation, protein intake and mTOR activation, and more


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

175.7694

Word Count

3,303

Sentence Count

138


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, ask me anything or AMA episode of the drive podcast.
00:00:15.820 I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access
00:00:20.280 the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created,
00:00:24.900 Or you can learn more now by going to peteratiyamd.com forward slash subscribe.
00:00:30.600 So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
00:00:38.840 Welcome to Ask Me Anything AMA episode 82.
00:00:42.820 In today's AMA, I answer listener questions across a wide range of topics.
00:00:48.260 Less about deep dives and more about how I think through real world trade-offs and apply
00:00:53.000 the science and practice.
00:00:54.080 So what are we talking about here today? We can talk about how health priorities and strategies
00:00:57.860 should shift across different decades of life, which chronic diseases feel toughest to manage,
00:01:03.780 and how I think about that hierarchy of risk, which emerging interventions look most promising
00:01:08.260 beyond exercise, wearables, which consumer metrics are actually useful in practice,
00:01:13.260 DEXA scans, what optimal screening intervals look like and how to interpret the results over time,
00:01:18.520 behavior change, what patients struggle with most in health routines and how to help
00:01:23.440 changes stick, training for balance, stability, and injury resilience and lessons from some
00:01:29.980 training setbacks, high protein diets and mTOR, how to think about mechanisms versus outcomes,
00:01:35.580 diet sodas and non-nutritive sweeteners, how to evaluate them and frankly what to compare them to,
00:01:41.680 plus a grab bag of some additional listener questions including health fads, emotional
00:01:45.460 health and sleep routines. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 82.
00:01:56.220 Peter, welcome to another AMA. For today's AMA, our goal is to hit a variety of topics and
00:02:04.480 questions that have come through frequently, most commonly. And instead of doing deep dives
00:02:10.420 on some of these topics what we're going to do is more talk about them how you would speak with
00:02:15.640 patients about them if they ask these questions or their questions on how you work with your
00:02:21.180 patients on specific issues so goal here is to be much less in-depth and much more practical
00:02:27.900 and actionable and with this we'll cover a variety of topics including how priorities around health
00:02:34.460 shift as people age the best tools we have to prevent dementia what wearable data do you think
00:02:40.860 is actually useful for your work with patients how you work with patients to make lasting changes in
00:02:46.200 their health routine how to think about training for stability recovering from injuries question
00:02:51.800 on diet soda mtor as it relates to high protein diets and more so with that said i think we'll
00:02:59.680 just jump right into it. First question being, as someone thinks about their trajectory as age,
00:03:07.780 so if someone goes from their 20s to 40s to 60s and beyond, how do you work with patients around
00:03:13.480 how their health priorities, strategies, tactics should shift across those decades as they age?
00:03:21.280 Well, I mean, I think it's a great question, and I get asked this in various forms all the time,
00:03:26.140 But also, I think in the spirit of full disclosure, I don't work with 20-year-olds typically.
00:03:33.680 And therefore, I don't think I have the breadth of experience to really speak intelligently
00:03:38.760 at that age range the way I do for people in their 40s and above.
00:03:43.380 Because I would bet that the median age of my patient is in the mid-50s with an interquartile
00:03:50.380 range of, call it 40 to 70.
00:03:54.700 So I think broadly, what I would say is that you can get away with so much in your 20s.
00:04:01.800 And again, I don't know that much of our audience even skews that young, but anybody listening to
00:04:06.260 this who's in their 20s, or certainly anybody who can remember being in their 20s, and even I can,
00:04:11.380 knows that what you can get away with is just incredible. And so one of the things that I talk
00:04:16.440 about with my daughter, for example, who's a teenager is, look, this is the period of time
00:04:20.960 in which you can overtrain. You can expand the envelope of your capacity. I know that the reason
00:04:27.920 to this day, despite the fact that I don't train that hard, I still have a much higher VO2 max
00:04:34.000 than would be predicted, I think, by my training volume. I owe that all to what I was doing when I
00:04:38.880 was young. That's one example. But I think we can achieve a lot by pushing in our 20s. So I actually
00:04:45.640 would encourage people in their teens and 20s to kind of find their limits a little bit. Again,
00:04:50.240 you're not going to pay the same price that you will in your 50s or 60s in doing so. Now,
00:04:55.460 obviously, that means you still have to be reasonable and don't do things that would
00:05:00.120 cause injuries. But again, I think that's a period of time for exploration and growth.
00:05:04.900 I think when people get into their 40s, most people start to have that first brush with mortality.
00:05:11.180 And part of that is external. You might be watching your parents' age or things of that nature.
00:05:16.120 But I think also part of it is internal. And even though it's not your own mortality,
00:05:20.040 that is readily apparent, it is apparent that you are not the person you were before. Probably,
00:05:25.600 and I would say certainly by the late 40s, that becomes true. And again, this manifests itself in
00:05:30.640 many ways, right? So for example, patients will say, look, man, there was a day when I could
00:05:33.740 throw down three drinks a night and feel nothing. And now I just have a headache the next day,
00:05:39.360 or I don't sleep well, and I don't perform well the next day, and all of those other things.
00:05:42.480 And so I think that that's an insight into what's happening to us physiologically in our 40s and
00:05:48.700 50s, which says we really need to start being very deliberate about what we do physically and
00:05:55.300 how we think about ourselves in terms of disease management and training. Again, when you look at
00:06:01.880 a disease like atherosclerosis, rarely, rarely is it going to brush up against somebody in their
00:06:07.940 40s. You can count the number of cases you see where a person has an MI in their 40s, but it is
00:06:13.980 undeniable that most people, at least microscopically, if they're walking around with high risk
00:06:20.000 factors, don't have a burden of disease. And so really, I would say that by the time you're in
00:06:24.740 your 40s, you really need to be thinking about, what am I doing from a prevention standpoint?
00:06:29.080 I don't want to wait too much longer to start taking those steps. And that means, again,
00:06:33.740 looking after the fundamentals and the basics. So am I metabolically healthy? Because for many
00:06:38.640 people, this is when they start to go off the rails. Am I still faced with dyslipidemia? Or
00:06:43.460 you know, is hypertension starting to creep up, all of those other things. And of course,
00:06:47.460 I always like to bring it back to physical and exercise. This is really a time where you don't
00:06:51.900 want to start missing workouts. And I know that that's, you know, for some people it's hard to do,
00:06:57.180 but you're better off doing something very frequently and not getting out of the habit
00:07:02.680 than you are taking long periods of time off and then coming back and trying to be heroic.
00:07:07.160 Now, I think once you get into your 60s and beyond, the name of the game is maintenance if you've done a good job until that point. But the good news is if you haven't, there's still an enormous opportunity for growth. I think that's an important distinction.
00:07:21.180 So if you've come into the seventh and eighth decade of your life not particularly healthy,
00:07:25.660 that should not be viewed as a scenario by which you decide, well, the die's been cast
00:07:31.760 and away I go.
00:07:33.120 Rather, it would be, no, look, I can still make gains here.
00:07:36.440 We've seen patients that come into our practice in their 60s with a VO2 max in the high teens,
00:07:41.580 low 20s.
00:07:42.500 That doesn't prevent us from training them and getting them to a much higher level of
00:07:46.620 fitness within two or three years.
00:07:48.020 The same is true with resistance training and things like that.
00:07:51.180 And of course, it's never too late to start taking the preventive steps around chronic
00:07:55.680 disease.
00:07:56.600 Alternatively, when a person comes into their 60s and 70s in great shape, our goal is do
00:08:01.140 no harm, right?
00:08:02.200 It's how do we preserve this for as long as possible?
00:08:04.460 And that might mean being a little bit more deliberate in some of the training that we
00:08:08.600 do, maybe trimming a little bit of the work that they do off and adding different types
00:08:13.260 of work to it.
00:08:14.060 But I would say broadly speaking, that would be my approach.
00:08:17.080 Jumping off that, the next question we got touches on the kind of major chronic diseases,
00:08:23.960 or as you call them, the four horsemen. Do you want to just run people through real quick
00:08:28.380 what those four are before we get to the question?
00:08:31.960 Yeah, they're sort of the big four killers in chronic disease land. So atherosclerotic
00:08:37.140 cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease being one, cancer, all of the neurodegenerative diseases
00:08:42.800 and dementing diseases is the third. And then the foundation upon which these all lie is metabolic
00:08:48.820 disease, which is a broad term that encompasses everything from insulin resistance through fatty
00:08:54.080 liver disease up until type 2 diabetes. And the question, which obviously is going to be a little
00:09:00.900 hard to answer in general, right? Because I know it can vary from person to person, but it was an
00:09:06.140 interesting question around of those major chronic diseases, which do you find the toughest to
00:09:12.300 combat or which do you worry about the most when working with your patients? Well, I'll start with
00:09:19.380 the opposite question, Nick, which is which do I worry about the least? And I worry the least about
00:09:24.920 metabolic disease and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease because one, we have a
00:09:29.980 pretty good handle on the drivers of those diseases. In fact, we have an exceptional handle
00:09:34.460 on the driver of those diseases. And that's half of the equation. The other half of the equation
00:09:38.660 is in response to that, we also have incredible tools for how to combat them. So when it comes
00:09:43.460 to reducing the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, or even treating them when present,
00:09:48.700 we know what to do. We've got the tools. So now let's really focus on the other two.
00:09:52.620 Now, the other two are kind of interesting, and so we'll take them one at a time. In the case of
00:09:57.480 cancer, you're dealing with a disease that has two very clear and well-understood what we would
00:10:04.020 call environmental triggers or behavioral risk factors. The first is smoking, and the second is
00:10:10.120 obesity. Although, as I've said many times before, obesity is simply a proxy, in my view, for the
00:10:16.060 constellation of things that accompanies insulin resistance. So there's a high overlap, of course,
00:10:20.420 between those. But really, I think it's the hyperinsulinemia and the inflammation that often,
00:10:24.480 though not always, accompanies obesity that is driving risk there. So obviously, when it comes
00:10:29.720 to cancer, step one is mitigate those two things, right? Don't smoke and be as metabolically healthy
00:10:34.520 as possible. But as anybody listening to this knows, just because you've done those two things
00:10:40.040 does not for a moment guarantee you're not going to be diagnosed with cancer. And I think that's
00:10:45.280 in many ways what makes cancer a very frightening disease is that as far as I can tell, at least
00:10:52.480 50% of cases of cancer arise in individuals for which there is no observable risk factor.
00:10:58.220 And as Bert Vogelstein, you know, put it many years ago in a then very controversial paper
00:11:04.640 that I believe was in science, it's simply about bad luck and that genes are constantly
00:11:10.840 undergoing mutation. DNA is constantly undergoing mutation. Most of the time it is being repaired.
00:11:17.240 If it is not being repaired, most of the time the cells that undergo those non-repaired DNA
00:11:23.540 mutations are being weeded out. But every once in a while, a population, a clonal population of
00:11:29.620 these will emerge and will evade the immune system and will ultimately become a cancer.
00:11:33.840 And again, I think that's happening about 50% of the time, which again, turns our attention then
00:11:38.840 to screening. This is why screening is so important because it's sort of like playing
00:11:44.620 Russian roulette with three rounds in the chamber. So I would argue that that's pretty scary to me,
00:11:50.240 Nick, when it comes to my health and the health of my family and the health of my patients and
00:11:54.660 friends and anybody that I care about. On the neurodegenerative side, I kind of divide these
00:11:59.680 into two categories, frankly. On the dementia side, we can really stratify a lot based on genes.
00:12:05.480 And so a person's genes will play a pretty significant role in risk. And obviously the
00:12:10.880 APOE4 gene is the most obvious of these. But unfortunately, there are other genes that are
00:12:16.680 involved here that are fortunately rare, but unfortunately highly, highly penetrant and
00:12:23.280 highly unmodifiable in the way that APOE4 is modifiable. So across that spectrum, of course,
00:12:30.100 my concern increases as the genetic risk increases. The good news is I feel we have a lot to offer
00:12:36.440 patients there in terms of prevention today that we didn't have five years ago and 10 years ago in
00:12:42.160 terms of our understanding. So interestingly, I find myself slightly less concerned about this
00:12:49.060 than I was concerned five and 10 years ago. Now on some of the neurodegenerative diseases outside
00:12:54.760 of the dementing diseases, I find these to be also terrifying. So here I'm thinking about diseases
00:13:00.440 like Parkinson's disease or Lou Gehrig's disease, Huntington's disease, of course, which is a
00:13:06.940 genetic condition that arises from a very clear genetic mutation. And here I find these,
00:13:13.980 I take some comfort in knowing that at least in the case of ALS, the prevalence of these are quite
00:13:19.380 low. But again, we still have no earthly clue what's driving them. Yes, there are probably some
00:13:23.820 cases that arise from genetic risk, but the truth of the matter is we just don't really know. Again,
00:13:28.540 with Parkinson's disease, we certainly are familiar with some of the genetic things that
00:13:32.900 are driving risk, but that doesn't answer all of it. And therefore, I have concern about those.
00:13:37.700 But I also realize that we have certain things under our control. And just as cognitive reserve
00:13:42.240 allows us to maintain resilience against cognitive decline, so too does movement reserve
00:13:49.340 give us some manner in which we can protect ourselves or at least be resilient towards
00:13:56.320 the neurodegenerative diseases that tackle movement and just to double click on a few things
00:14:03.060 on the cardiovascular disease and metabolic diseases just because you kind of how you
00:14:10.080 answer this question was which ones are the toughest to combat most worry about just because
00:14:14.040 those diseases are easier to combat that doesn't necessarily mean that people should ignore those
00:14:20.720 because they're still number one killer in cardiovascular disease. And metabolic disease
00:14:26.820 hugely drives everything else, correct? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, if we did nothing
00:14:32.140 else on this podcast but talk about cardiovascular disease and all of the ways that we should be
00:14:36.680 screening for it and preventing it, we would probably save more lives than talking about
00:14:40.660 anything else. And so, yeah, I am still heartbroken when I learn of the death of anybody
00:14:45.840 due to cardiovascular disease, including actually a mentor of mine who died suddenly somewhat
00:14:51.480 recently and, you know, insanely healthy individual who just dropped out of a sudden
00:14:57.400 MI at about the age of 70. This is a guy who functioned like he was about 52 and then just
00:15:04.240 dropped dead suddenly. And yeah, I'll always kick myself for not being more of a hardliner about
00:15:09.660 forcing him to do some of the screening stuff that I think would have made a difference.
00:15:14.100 and we'll link in the show notes to various content podcasts amas newsletters etc on
00:15:23.160 cardiovascular disease the second one to follow up on which is a question we got which fits really
00:15:30.320 well with what you just talked about is for dementia prevention besides exercise which
00:15:37.280 you've openly talked about as one of the best ways to reduce the risk of that what looks most
00:15:43.480 promising to you. Thank you for listening to today's sneak peek AMA episode of The Drive.
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