Peter Attia· MD
the final hours of its life impacts the food quality and even if you're eating the most she she grass fed organic cow make no mistake about it the final hour or two of that animal's life is very stressful as it goes through the process yeah yeah um and i believe it and it's totally different when an animal gets you know a bullet through it and dies within you know again and we're trying to make sure it's an instant death for the for that meat process yeah um there's there's no cortisol surging through it there's no lactic acid surging through it um so yeah what you did is actually about the most humane thing you could have offered that animal yeah relative to anything you've eaten but also given to what its natural history is like that's the other thing people have to understand like these old animals don't go to old animal folks homes no they don't have graceful exits either no he's gonna get he's gonna get killed by the other wolves he's gonna drown crossing rivers because when they make this right migration they have to do a bunch of river crossings it's gonna freeze to death they have a harder time they have a harder time getting food as they age so he's going to starve he's going to be killed by another caribou yeah yeah so it was really this really just a deep appreciation set in after that and sort of gratitude where you go you're very thankful for that me but also the fact that all meat you know i wish that our meat system um had some changes to it but you become grateful for all the other meat that we have because you're like wow like look at the buy-in that goes into this you see that it is a life you know and so i think it made me realize you kind of have this like very intense realization that for one life to go on another has to die to your point about the carbon cycle and then the next step is wait a minute i'm not left out of that am i right yep and so this eventually gets me thinking about about death in general and how you know i'm going to die you're going to die we're all going to die and if you think about that if you think about right now we're just sitting here having a moment very soon in the near future you're gonna be having a moment and then all of a sudden there won't be a moment anymore that is an uncomfortable thought right so i start thinking about that and this idea of you know death is the most uncomfortable thing that we can that we can think about really when you do it right you ball up like a child but when i started practicing that i found that it improved my life because it improved my behavior changed my behavior when you realize you're gonna die all of a sudden you don't pop off in traffic someone cut you off you start to make decisions about work and what you're gonna do with your time that are better it improves your interactions with other people everyone from my wife to the lady at the 7-eleven and the thing is that in the u.s we don't think about death we sort of want to ignore it if you look at our structures so we've talked about our food system right our food system is based around meat that you don't really know that it's come from an animal the way that it's processed we even have euphemisms for different cuts of meat instead of saying you know the muscles the muscles that they are and it's also in our funeral system whereas after someone passes away what do we do we dress them up to look as alive and youthful as possible we have a viewing and then we're told to take our mind off it it sounds like take your mind off it don't worry about it don't think about it and i just wondered what some of the repercussions of that are and it got me also thinking about well are there other ways that places do this and so this leads me to this trip to bhutan that i take so bhutan is a very fascinating place and i mean you know you have a whole chapter on it which is amazing and i want to hear all about it were there other candidate places you looked at besides bhutan bhutan came on the radar and it kind of became that i think that's the place i should go no it's a it's an amazing discussion about the contrast yeah so how do they die well i mean first of all what's so fascinating about them is they're on if you measure it by gdp they're 160 something 100 184 or something yeah they just don't dirt poor yeah but in a lot of happiness measurements they rank in the top 20. so they punch way above their weight and death this idea of death and how they approach it i think factors in there's a lot of things going on but i think their relationship with death does factor into this and in bhutan it's they just take it into their life so the bhutanese are told to think about death three times a day it's kind of a cultural practice uh death is woven into a lot of the art and the cultural dances and heritage and there's even these little clay pyramids called sassas so this is mud mixed with ashes of cremated people and they're all over the country all over the country you take a turn like on a bend in a road and there might be 300 of them they're in the window seals in the city i mean they're everywhere so there's this constant reminder and it flows in with this idea of impermanence and buddhism and i think that bhutan is a country really um plays that up so i traveled there to learn more about this and i and this was after the hunt this was after that because it grew out of this understanding of yeah and uh i met with three different people there the first was