Reviews and Comments

I read this nearly 20 year old book after Peter Attia's recent longevity book as comparison. The premise is that using all of the latest knowledge on how to live healthily longer and the ever increasing life expectancy every year we could eventually live forever. Literally. Kerzweil had fantastical (pun intended) projections for when technologies would be here for life extension. He projected that by the 2020s (today) we were expected to have nanobots replacing blood cells and other bodily functions, a whole parallel bionic digestive system so we could eat whatever we wanted while the nanobots would be building out our real nutrition. Their precursors were going to be drugs that achieve comparably fantastical things a decade or two before.

Beyond their fantastical technology projections they bought into a lot of the craze that still dominates alt-health world with radical exaggerations of the negative effects of artificial sweeteners, coffee, EM radiation. While simultaneously they were really big on the exaggerated health claims of alkaline water and radical over-supplementation. The latter leads to suggested regiments that they follow of taking literally 90-250 pills a day. No thank you.

The core that is good is their diet, physical exercise, stress management, sleep, and cognitive exercises. It was pretty run of the mill advice you would get from any major mainstream place. That doesn't sell though hence all of the above stuff which is at best unnecessary to at worst ludicrous or maybe even dangerous if done impromperly.

It was an interesting snapshot in time but the juice really isn't worth the squeeze. You can find the real actionable information anywhere.

Overall the book presents broad stroke information on longevity that looks at the usual areas: exercise, diet, sleep, and how to be proactive with health. He contrasts this "Medicine 3.0" approach with the existing "Medicine 2.0" approach. Overall the suggestions are solid and mostly align with standard medical advice. His exercise level suggestions are far more than what is usually recommended or shown to be effective in studies but he has rationale for it which makes sense and may pan out over the long term but there is no study data to confirm it. Nothing he suggests is outside the realm of safety.

The food discussion is a bit more problematic. Again the core is good bones however I think prior his Paleo/Keto bent shows here. He looks at it mostly through the carb/fat/protein macros lense. The way he presents it you would not be wrong to conclude that you pretty much must eat a lot of animal protein to stay healthy and the plant side of the equation is kind of moot. No epidimiological data holds this up. All of it shows that a plant dominant diet is a key part of long term health and longevity. Even the handful of studies that show that people who ate meat had better outcomes than vegetarians and vegans, the meat level consumed is way less than one serving a day (usually in the 2-3 ounces/60-90 grams level). While he has no problem telling people to just suck it up on exercise and sleep fronts on this front he minimizes this by essentially saying "eat a lot of meat three times a day" follow up with minimizing negative longevity effects of that advice with "just take a statin" and "not everyone's lipid profile is adversely affected by eating a lot of saturated fat". This is probably the weakest part of the book.

I was expecting more actionable information as well. This is more like a primer with a pitch for "Medicine 3.0" which is going to specialists for all these special tests, interactions, etc. I personally do do all those things but I have to pay a lot out of pocket for that. Would it be great if all of this was covered by standard medical insurance? Absolutely. It isn't. There are plenty of things that those that can't afford that sort of treatment could be doing, and most of it is following standard guidelines put out by government health organizations. Laying that out could have been helpful to readers who can't spend thousands of dollars a year out of pocket on these things.

Overall I learned almost nothing new in this book because I follow these topics intensely already. For someone who has never heard of these things it could be a helpful primer but I have concerns about people coming away with misimpressions on the diet side of things and perhaps even fatalism about the approachability of these things if "Medicine 3.0" is out of financial range for them.