What’s the most important thing you can do for long-term health and quality of life?
Nutrition?
Sleep?
Stress management?
Nope, although those are all important. It’s exercise, hands down. That’s one of the many powerful points in a new book, “Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity,” by Peter Attia, MD, with Bill Gifford.
“Exercise is by far the most potent longevity ‘drug,’” says Attia, 50, a former surgeon who focuses on extending “healthspan,” or the length of time when we enjoy our lives as we age without becoming frail, weak or pain ridden.
“Exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline better than any other intervention,” Attia says. “It is the single most potent tool we have in the health-span-enhancing toolkit — and that includes nutrition, sleep and meds.”
The book is no exercise “how to” manual. Instead, Attia dives deep into the science of living longer and better, and what he calls “Medicine 3.0,” which looks more at prevention of disease than mere treatment of symptoms.
Among the fascinating morsels, Attia says most of us die because of one of the “four horsemen” or primary causes of slow death: heart disease or stroke; metabolic disfunction; neuro-generative disease; and cancer.