Eat Your Ice Cream – Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD

The wellness industry has a problem, and Ezekiel Emanuel is one of the few people willing to call it out. In his new book, Eat Your Ice Cream: A Contrarian’s Guide to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier, the bioethicist, oncologist, and former White House health advisor challenges both the influencers selling unproven supplements and the culture of wellness-as-self-punishment.

In this episode, Emanuel makes a compelling research-backed case that the single most powerful determinant of health, longevity, and happiness is social connection, not sleep scores, protein intake, or VO2 max. Drawing on the Harvard Adult Development Study, the longitudinal study, going strong after 88 years, and other research worldwide, he explains why loneliness is biologically dangerous, and why doctors almost never ask about it.

He also makes important points about retirement. When 40 hours of purposeful work becomes 40 hours of passive television, the brain pays a price. Emanuel argues that retirement requires deliberate design to replace the cognitive challenge, social contact, and structured schedule that work once provided. And he offers Ben Franklin, inventor of bifocals at 79, and still inventing at 81, as a model for what staying fully alive in later life actually looks like.

Ezekiel Emanuel joins us from Washington, DC.

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For More on Ezekiel Emanuel

Eat Your Ice Cream: A Contrarian’s Guide to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier

Website

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Bio

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, is the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor.

An oncologist and world leader in health policy and bioethics, he is a Special Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and held that position until August 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council. In this role, he was instrumental in drafting the Affordable Care Act.

Dr. Emanuel is the most widely cited bioethicist in history. He has over 350 publications and has authored or edited 15 books. His recent publications include Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care (2020), Prescription for the Future (2017), Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act Will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System (2014) and Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (2013). In 2008, he published Healthcare, Guaranteed: A Simple, Secure Solution for America, which included his own recommendations for health care reform.Dr. Emanuel regularly contributes to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic and often appears on BBC, NPR, CNN, MS NOW and other media outlets.

He has received numerous awards, including election to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Science and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Physicians, and the Royal College of Medicine (UK). He has been named a Dan David Prize Laureate in Bioethics and is a recipient of the AMA-Burroughs Wellcome Leadership Award, the Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation David E. Rogers Award, the President’s Medal for Social Justice from Roosevelt University, and the John Mendelsohn Award from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, as well as honorary degrees from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Union Graduate College, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Macalester College.

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