#325 ‒ Peter’s key takeaways on bone health, calorie restriction and energy balance, dopamine and addiction, gene editing, and testosterone therapy safety with a prostate cancer diagnosis | Quarterly Podcast Summary #3

Is there something you indulge in more often than you'd like? Maybe it's checking social media, eating junk food, or binging shows and movies on streaming platforms. In Dopamine Nation, addiction treatment specialist Anna Lembke explores what causes these behaviors and how you can take back control. She explains both the neurological and emotional causes of overindulgence and provides clear actionables to help you stop.

In this guide, you'll learn about how pleasure and pain motivate you to consume, strategies for keeping your brain’s natural chemicals in balance, and solutions to the psychological reasons so many people have a hard time stepping away from their favorite indulgence. Our guide supplements Lembke’s advice with targeted strategies while placing her principles in context with broader conversations on the nature of addiction.

Most people think of willpower as a virtue, an admirable trait that we strive for but don't always achieve. But science tells a different story. Willpower—the ability to exercise self-control when you need it—is an instinct that's wired into our brains. Yet it seems like willpower vanishes at crucial moments, like when your coworker shows up with a box of donuts.

To harness your innate willpower, you need to understand what factors make you give up your self-control. In The Willpower Instinct, Stanford psychology professor Kelly McGonigal details how our natural willpower gets compromised by stress, distraction, lack of sleep and exercise, and a host of other factors. Using the latest psychology and neuroscience research, she offers strategies to help us defeat procrastination, control cravings, and achieve our goals.

Do you check your phone first thing when you wake up? Are you regularly pulled into the black hole of YouTube or Instagram in the middle of your workday? Do you often feel scattered and distracted? If so, it might be time for a dopamine detox.

In Dopamine Detox, Thibaut Meurisse argues that all of us suffer from a constant state of sensory overload that robs us of our focus. The culprit: the neurotransmitter dopamine. Meurisse explains that by detoxing from activities that trigger dopamine, you can reclaim your capacity for the deep focus necessary to accomplish your long-term goals.

In this guide, we’ll explore the science of dopamine, outline what causes sensory overload, and explain how to go about a dopamine detox. We’ll supplement Meurisse’s advice with research on the effectiveness of detoxes and offer strategies from other productivity experts for improving your focus and maximizing your potential.

CRISPR gene-editing technology is facilitating groundbreaking treatments for genetic diseases like sickle cell, and it’s promoting global food security through the creation of disease-resistant crops. Continued improvement of CRISPR technology could drive personalized medicine, provide new treatments, and revolutionize agriculture and industrial biotechnology.

How might the gene editing technology called CRISPR transform humanity? In his 2021 book The Code Breaker, journalist, historian, and award-winning biographer Walter Isaacson discusses the advent and future of this groundbreaking scientific tool. He traces its development (focusing on Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna) and explores its significance as a victory for women in science. He also argues that CRISPR has the potential to change life as we know it and explains how, in some ways, it already has.

This guide focuses on four ideas: the biological feature known as CRISPR, Doudna and the other scientists who developed the CRISPR gene editing technology, the moral quandaries CRISPR technology presents, and some of CRISPR’s realized and potential real-world applications. In our commentary, we’ll explain updates on CRISPR science since the book’s publication, explore key scientists’ careers in greater detail, and discuss various philosophical perspectives on CRISPR-related moral issues.

Victoria Gray suffers from a painful condition called sickle cell disease. She received an experimental treatment using the gene-editing technique CRISPR. Gray’s health has greatly improved, and a year later, shows no signs of declining.

Imagine a world where our lifespans aren’t limited by illness or aging, where people could live for as long as they wanted to. This sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, but according to Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis, and Robert Hariri, such a scenario may be more fact than fiction. In Life Force, the authors explain how ongoing development of new technologies and information in the medical field may extend our lifespans beyond what we ever thought possible. Robbins is a bestselling author and speaker, Diamandis is a bestselling author and scientist, and Hariri is a neurosurgeon and scientist.

In our guide, we’ll explore the lifestyle changes you can make now to increase your lifespan and overall health. We’ll also look at new technologies that are rapidly improving our healthcare and upcoming technologies that have the potential to bring us even closer to the ideal of immortality. We’ll supplement this with elaboration on some of the authors’ more complex ideas, and we’ll contextualize the guide’s information in the fields of science, technology, and sociology.

Do you exercise enough? You know it’s good for your overall health—but do you know it’s also vital for your brain? John Ratey is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard, and he’s been convinced by the scientific and clinical evidence—our brains are built to move. He’s seen firsthand how patients struggling with addiction, anxiety, and depression are transformed by exercise.

In Spark, he discusses the evolutionary origins of the mind-body connection and how exercise optimizes brain function and supports mental health. In this guide, we’ll examine these theories as well as Ratey’s recommendations for how to incorporate exercise into your life, exploring which exercise is most beneficial and how you can stick to a routine.

Along the way, we’ll discuss how the theories of other experts align with or differ from Ratey’s ideas, and we’ll update the science where new insights have emerged in the years since the book’s release.

Picture the end of your life. Do you want to die from heart disease? Cancer? Diabetes?

In How Not to Die, Michael Greger argues that a plant-based, whole-food diet has been scientifically shown to reduce the most common diseases leading to death. He then gives his recommendation for "The Daily Dozen" foods to eat to maximize health benefits.

Why do we get sick? Why hasn’t natural selection, over millions of years, prevented us from getting cancer, heart disease, and depression?

The science of evolutionary medicine says that our bodies have evolved over millions of years as a set of compromises, largely in pursuit of reproductive fitness. Put concisely, whatever gets you to survive and have kids is going to persist in the gene pool, even if it causes you lots of disease and pain in adult life. Learn more about the evolutionary roots of obesity, infectious disease, aging, and depression.

Cancer is one of the most frightening diseases in the world today; it’s deadly and often extremely hard to cure. As such, doctors and researchers have spent enormous amounts of time and money trying to figure out exactly what cancer is, how it works, and how to cure it. The Cancer Code by Jason Fung is an overview of scientists’ major discoveries about cancer, starting from ancient times and continuing to the present day. This guide will help you be more informed about this deadly disease.

Fung divides research trends into three different models of cancer, explores the strengths and weaknesses of each model, and discusses their implications for future cancer research and treatment. Our commentary will expand on some of Fung’s key ideas, offer counterpoints to others, and suggest some other books for further reading on this complex topic. We’ll also examine the current effectiveness of a number of cancer treatment methods and what recent discoveries might imply about future treatment options.