My major concern is the very beginning of the interview, in which Attia, whose specialty is human longevity, says, “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff…. At the population level, it’s unmistakable what happens at the age of 75.” The statement has special resonance for me, as my birthday is December 1 (known locally as “Jack Finding His Father Dead in a Chair Day”). I don’t look forward to falling off any cliffs.
To frame the discussion with the threshold question to begin most ethics inquiries, “What’s going on here?”
1. The doctor is irresponsible and lying. He doesn’t say that statistically, there is a definite, measurable decline in human health as a result of aging if one is looking at the human population as a whole. He says “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff,” which will be heard as “At 75, all men and women fall off a cliff.” That is quite simply not true. It certainly isn’t true for my family, as my mother, father, and grandmother all were lively, productive, engaged and active well into their late 80’s. I just got a Facebook post from Pat Boone showing him training in a gym; he also does a weekly radio show on the Sirius ’50s channel in which he is witty, erudite, funny and except for a little hoarseness, immediately recognizable as the same guy who sang “April Love.” Pat’s 91. My next door neighbors are a decade older than me, and as far as I can see and hear, they are as active and lucid as ever, and I’ve known them for almost 45 years.
2. In 1995, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote “The Bell Curve,” exploring group variations in IQ scores among minority populations. The found that the median IQ scores of whites as a group was significantly higher than that of blacks as a group, and both were less than Asians as a group. At no point did they write, say or suggest, “Both black men and women have significantly lower IQs than white men and women.” That would have been a false conclusion from their data, which had no predictive value for individuals at all. Yet that is an exact equivalent of what Attia said on “60 Minutes,” without any challenge from his interviewer. I know, he followed it up with “at the population level,” which is incompetently and unforgivably vague, then said, “it is unmistakable what happens.” Not what happens to most people, or what happens on average, but what happens, which implies “to everyone.”
3. The theory being posited (on Ann Althouse’s blog, for example) is that the interview and “60 Minutes” featuring it were a deliberate shot at President Trump, who is, as we all know, well past the “falling off the cliff” age. Indeed, part of the narrative from the Axis is that Trump is “losing it” and “unfit,” as if progressives and the media were not forever estopped from making that claim after their deliberate cover-up of President Biden’s incapacity for four long years. I wonder if tying this interview to the anti-Trump conspiracy (and it is one, not just a theory) is confirmation bias. That’s what I hate so much about today’s corrupt non-journalism: it is now literally impossible to trust either the stories, the features, or the motives behind how they are framed.
4. In the end, I think I will place Dr. Attia and his interview in my “irresponsible fear-mongering” file. Most people past 40 don’t need to be constantly reminded that they’re getting older and are going to get sick and die eventually, so someone going on TV and saying “If you are 75 or soon getting there, your days are numbered! You’re doomed!” is neither helpful nor productive.
5. My message to Dr. Attia: “Bite me. I’ll dance on your grave, asshole. Just you wait and see.”
Ethics Alarms 
Yeah. That guy had the aroma of snake oil about him. I think he used 60 Minutes as an info-mercial to rope in narcissists with too much money who might want to drop a couple hundred thousand for a common sense program to — maybe — forestall their deaths by a few years.
I’m 81 and doing OK. All original equipment, with a couple of tune-up sessions, but still kicking. .. so I must have missed the turnoff to the cliff.
You beat me to it. It is kind of like CBD oil and medical grade pot. If you listen to the media and the pundits, CBD and medical pot are the elixir of longevity and a life without pain, Dr. Attia be damned.
jvb
Respect!
a. I’ll dance on your grave.
b. Just you wait and see.
These two sentences combined can’t be true at the same moment
But as someone (F. Scott Fitzgerald?) wrote:
My conclusion:
Jack is not a cliff hanger-on !
Why do you assume someone won’t know if I dance on their grave? Especially at Halloween…
I give him a pass, noting this is in speech, not writing, and he was interrupted by the interviewer, breaking the connection between the beginning and the end of the sentence.
In facts and logic there is no difference in meaning between:
a) At the population level, both men and women fall off a cliff at 75
b) Both men and women fall off a cliff at the population level at 75
c) At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff, at the population level
These statements are all true.
He then talks about how to join the part of the population that continues to thrive. Seems good to me!
What I suspect Attia is referring to (if indeed he is referring to actual data! — I didn’t see the interview) is that there’s a noticeable change in slope around 75 for…. something relevant to health and longevity (did he specify what the dependent variable was?). What the data for masters weightlifters (a research interest and avocation for me since I am one) shows for the decline in grip strength for male weightlifters aged 35 to 90 is pretty linear (no notable changes in slope).
However, this is cross-sectional data, so there’s a meaningful paring of the population — as one gets into the 75+ categories it becomes a game of “last man standing on the platform” so the selection of men becomes more and more unusual at the population level. In the same way, people in their early 90s like Pat Boone (ESPECIALLY if they are hitting the gym — most people that age are not!) are already drawn from a rather different population from people in the age group 70-75…. because many of the latter won’t MAKE it to their early 90s….
Looks like Attia didn’t pull the number 75 out of thin air; I found several sites talking about how there are a variety of age related declines that are hard to reverse after 75 (which implies one needs to take action BEFORE reaching that age to set oneself on a better trajectory): https://labmonk.com/10-health-declines-that-rarely-reverse-after-age-75/
I suspect one of the DVs he may have been thinking of for the “fall of a cliff” comment might be markers of brain aging (related to cognitive decline). There’s a recent study of brain aging in Nature Aging (any of the Nature publications are high profile and likely to be picked up in the popular science press, so I suspect Attia read this study) that highlighted three turning points: 57, 70, and 78.
Liu, WS., You, J., Chen, SD. et al. Plasma proteomics identify biomarkers and undulating changes of brain aging. Nat Aging 5, 99–112 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-024-00753-6
Here’s the abstract:
Proteomics enables the characterization of brain aging biomarkers and discernment of changes during brain aging. We leveraged multimodal brain imaging data from 10,949 healthy adults to estimate brain age gap (BAG), an indicator of brain aging. Proteome-wide association analysis across 4,696 participants of 2,922 proteins identified 13 significantly associated with BAG, implicating stress, regeneration and inflammation. Brevican (BCAN) (β = −0.838, P = 2.63 × 10−10) and growth differentiation factor 15 (β = 0.825, P = 3.48 × 10−11) showed the most significant, and multiple, associations with dementia, stroke and movement functions. Dysregulation of BCAN affected multiple cortical and subcortical structures. Mendelian randomization supported the causal association between BCAN and BAG. We revealed undulating changes in the plasma proteome across brain aging, and profiled brain age-related change peaks at 57, 70 and 78 years, implicating distinct biological pathways during brain aging. Our findings revealed the plasma proteomic landscape of brain aging and pinpointed biomarkers for brain disorders.