Alex Khavin is a former financial services professional who has held several senior executive positions. Alex Khavin is also interested in health and longevity.
There is a lot of focus in various circles on longevity, and living a longer life. But Mrs. Khavin believes that the quality of life is much more important than quantity. What is the use of living to 100 if the last 30 years are spent with a debilitating disease? Below are a few excerpts from an article by the NY Times titled "Want to Live Longer and Healthier? Peter Attia Has a Plan":
"Modern medicine has been a miracle for healthy aging. But what if we’re still thinking about the subject of living better for longer all wrong? That’s the premise of Dr. Peter Attia’s book, “Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity,” which he wrote with Bill Gifford and has been a runaway best seller since it was published this spring. In the book, Attia distinguishes between standard medical thinking, what he calls Medicine 2.0, and his approach, Medicine 3.0. In his telling, Medicine 2.0 is oriented toward addressing the four chronic diseases of aging that will probably be the cause of most of our deaths, but only after they become problems. (Those chronic diseases are heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative diseases and Type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction.) Medicine 3.0, though, aims to proactively prevent those things for as long as possible and allow us to maintain better health deeper into old age. How exactly? Not through any techno-fantasies of biohacking or wonder-drug supplements but largely with highly rigorous, detailed and personalized monitoring and treatment of our nutrition, sleep, exercise and mental health. “When you’re at the end of your life, if your health has failed you, no amount of money is going to buy that back,” says Attia, who is 50. “Health is everything to us. As such, we have to accept the fact that it might take work to get it right.”..."
"All right, we can leave it at that. If you were to say to someone, “If you don’t do anything else to increase your health span, at least start doing X,” what would X be? For most people, the answer is exercise more. Then within that, you can get into the weeds. Many people, I think, are underemphasizing strength training. There’s the sense that, Yep, I’m out there, I’m hiking, I’m walking. Those things are great, but the sine qua non of aging is the shrinkage or atrophy of Type 2 muscle fiber. That’s the thing we probably have to guard most against, and you can’t do that without resistance training. Count the number of times in human history when someone in the last decade of their lives said: “I wish I had less muscle mass. I wish I was less strong.” The answer is zero...."
"But saving for retirement has metrics that we can apply to help us achieve our goals. What are the analogous metrics when it comes to healthful aging? That’s what we do with patients. I’ll use my example: I have a paper where I draw my lifeline. So I’m at 50. Then I go out by decade: at 60, 70, 80, 90. So what is the game between 80 and 90? I have a specific list of things — probably more than 25 — that I want to be able to do in that decade. It’s not just like I want to be able to walk. It’s like I want to be able to walk at this speed for this duration; I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool if there are no steps; I want to be able to pull back on a compound bow with a 50-pound draw weight. Then we deconstruct each of those from objective measurements. What VO2 max is required to do that? What amount of leg strength? What amount of lower-leg variability? What grip strength? Then we ask, given the inevitable decline of all those features, if you want to have those parameters at 90, what do they need to look like at age 50? What do they need to look like at age 70? At 80? Just as we use a discount rate on future cash flows to figure out retirement, we’re doing the same thing on physiologic parameters. All of my training is geared toward performance 40 years from now...."
