Peter Attia· MD
indirectly I would say there are I think some pretty interesting compelling pilot data that suggests that rapamycin is neuroprotective and again rapamycin a very potent inhibitor of mTOR would presumably on some level induce a toughie gee I think it's a very interesting question as to what is it about rapamycin that induces a longevity phenotype rapamycin to me is the most interesting molecule out there because it is I think the only molecule that has demonstrated a longevity benefit across all four models of eukaryotic cells so that's a really big deal that can't be ignored but how much of that benefit is through a toff adji i'd like to turn that question to you how much of it is through inhibition of senescence cells reduction of inflammation again so it's very indirect and it speaks to again again I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theory guy because I'm not but it is a little frustrating that we have these amazing tools but because they're not particularly profitable you don't really have somebody that's interested in answering them and that's why I again come back to hey I think these are answerable questions B I don't think they are billion dollar questions I think they are really questions that are amenable to the philanthropic community and I think from an ROI perspective it's hard to think of examples of where you could put dollars to work in research that would have a greater impact on human life right and I think that our biomedical community is mostly focused on putting out fires rather than disease prevention although I've seen a change I mean I see at the NCI the National Cancer Institute a bigger interest in cancer prevention so I think people are coming around to realizing that making people healthier longer is probably more important than once they discovered to have Stage four pancreatic cancer what can we throw at it to make them live another two months yeah again it is sort of amazing to me how lopsided our resource allocation is with respect to that problem because you're absolutely right we have spent probably a core of a trillion dollars in the last 40 years on the second question which is once you have metastatic cancer how do you live longer and we've done an analysis on this so for the quarter of a trillion dollars that has been spent on that problem on average for solid organ tumors we have extended median survival by less than about a year since 1970 so almost 50 years that's pretty sad when you think about the fact that there's not much evidence we've reduced the arrival of cancer in fact all we've done is basically come up with a second leading cause of cancer in terms of modifiable behavior which is after smoking it becomes down to diabetes insulin resistance and all of the metabolic distress oh yeah I'll get off my soapbox now but again I this is in many ways just a sort of a plea for help which is I think there's interesting had amazing opportunity to understand this so there's another component to this that worries me greatly so what we see you know so a lot of this you're talking about controlling metabolism to preserve health through implementation of fasting and understanding fasting but look what's happened to the American diet I mean there are people now that don't even recognize vegetables in the supermarket there are people that only eat prepared food and so what we've seen is on the one hand you're talking about preserving health and all that but on the other hand the overall health of Americans is deteriorating obesity is greatly increased and has no sign of abating the diet of Americans loaded with high fructose corn syrup and diets that are disproportionate with prepared food so the only way to globally improve the health of Americans or anyone else for that matter is to deal with both of these problems at the same time and to me that's probably the greatest line of reasoning that says fasting is probably protective against all chronic disease because if you look at the three main chronic diseases that account for to our last analysis eighty two percent of deaths above the age of