Peter Attia

Peter Attia (born March 19, 1973) is a Canadian-American author, licensed physician and former researcher known for his work in longevity medicine. He is the author of Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.

Early life and education

Attia was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is the child of Egyptian Christian immigrant parents. Several of his paternal uncles died of heart disease: his uncle Francis died of a sudden heart attack at 46, when Attia was five, another uncle at 42 and a third at 69. His father, who worked at a limestone quarry, had a heart attack in his mid-sixties and later received a coronary stent. Attia has written that this family history drove his interest in cardiovascular prevention and that Outlive "probably wouldn't have been written" without it. As a ten-year-old he hoped to become a professional ice hockey player. As a teenager he took up boxing, which, as he later recounted in Outlive, gave him an outlet for the anger left by a difficult childhood, and he went on to compete at an elite junior level. He began boxing and martial arts at 13, and from about 14 trained with weights alongside his best friend in a basement gym on the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, both of them aspiring prizefighters. Around the age of 19 he turned from boxing to mathematics, crediting the sport with the discipline and focus he brought to his studies.

He studied at Queen's University at Kingston, graduating in 1996 with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. He initially intended to pursue a doctorate in aerospace engineering, and by his senior year had applied to leading PhD programmes in the field. During a post-baccalaureate year completing medical school prerequisites, he volunteered on the pediatric cancer ward of Kingston General Hospital, an experience he said confirmed his move from engineering to medicine. He then entered Stanford University School of Medicine, from which he received his Doctor of Medicine in 2001. Attia has described how, determined to be ready for the operating room, he spent every Thursday night as a medical student practising suturing at his desk. After reading Steven Rosenberg's The Transformed Cell, he decided to become a surgical oncologist, and in his third year he spent four months in Rosenberg's laboratory at the National Cancer Institute. During medical school a weightlifting back injury required two surgeries and left him largely bedridden for months.

Career

Surgical training and cancer research

From 2001 to 2006, Attia began a residency in general surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He left his general surgery residency at Johns Hopkins in 2006 and spent two years as a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, studying immunotherapy for melanoma.

Consulting

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. He and his wife moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and he has said he felt at the time that he had "wasted a decade" of his life. Hired into the healthcare practice, he was moved to credit risk because of his quantitative background, helping large U.S. banks comply with new rules requiring reserves against unexpected losses. By late summer 2007 his team had concluded that the banks would lose more money on prime mortgages over the following two years than they had made in the previous decade, and in late 2007 he presented the findings to the management of a major U.S. bank.

Turn to longevity medicine

After the birth of his daughter, medical tests showed that Attia, although still in his thirties and exercising heavily, already had risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The finding prompted him to change his own diet and to make the prevention of chronic disease the focus of his work.

Attia has written that in September 2009, after a 14-hour swim from Los Angeles to Santa Catalina Island, his wife told him he should "work on being a little less not thin". At 36 he weighed 210 pounds (95 kg), about 50 pounds (23 kg) more than his boxing weight; blood tests showed he had become insulin resistant, and his testosterone was below the 5th percentile for his age.

He stopped consuming added sugar and later followed a ketogenic diet for three years, which he has said reversed his incipient metabolic syndrome; he also practised periodic extended water-only fasts. He sought out researchers as informal mentors, moving from nutrition and metabolism to atherosclerosis, cancer, neurodegenerative disease and the biology of aging; his mentors on cardiovascular disease included Tom Dayspring, Allan Sniderman and Ron Krauss. Follow-up CT angiograms in 2016 and 2022 showed no new plaque.

His views have since changed. He no longer follows a ketogenic diet, noting that versions high in saturated fat raise apoB in many people, and he stopped recommending prolonged fasting because of the associated muscle loss. He now regards exercise, rather than nutrition, as "the most potent longevity 'drug'". In 2016 he travelled to Easter Island, where rapamycin was discovered, with biologists David Sabatini and Navdeep Chandel and author Tim Ferriss, partly to scout a site for a research conference on the drug. In December 2018 he met exercise physiologist Iñigo San Millán, director of performance for the UAE Team Emirates cycling team, whose work on zone 2 training became central to Attia's own regimen.

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 experts each week, covering topics such as longevity, metabolic health, and medical research.