Thomas Dayspring, M.D., FACP, FNLA – Part I of V: an introduction to lipidology

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hi, everyone, welcome to this special edition of The Peter Attia Drive. This is a special edition because it is the longest podcast ever recorded in the history of podcasts. Maybe it was a seven-hour, only getting up to pee once interview with Dr. Tom Dayspring, who a number of you will immediately recognize by name. Tom is one of my most important mentors and is generally the mentor to the mentors in the field of lipidology.
We're breaking this into five parts. So this is gonna be the week of Tom. So today, if you're listening to this in modestly real time, on Monday, we're releasing part one, and there will be a part released each day, Monday through Friday. So this seven-hour podcast will be released over the course of a week. I'll call it the week of Tom. And what you're listening to right now is part one. I'm gonna use part one to give the bio and background on Tom and give you just the insights over what is covered in part one or episode one. And then prior to each episode, I will just highlight what's going on there. Tom Dayspring is the chief academic officer for True Health Diagnostics, a laboratory company.
Tom is a fellow of both the American College of Physicians and the National Lipid Association. He's board certified in internal medicine and clinical lipidology.
He practiced medicine in Jersey for just under 40 years. And in the last two decades, he's given about 4,000 domestic and international lectures to lipidologists and cardiologists everywhere, including a little over 600 CME programs on this topic. He's listed in the Guide to America's Top Physicians and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Lipidology.
He's authored and co-authored more manuscripts than I was able to count, although that's obviously a countable number. And he has received the 2011 NLA, National Lipid Association President's Award for Service to Clinical Lipidology.
I actually spoke to the president of the NLA who gave him that award, and he described it as the most important award he had ever given out.
Tom's really active on Twitter at DrLipid, that's D-R-L-I-P-I-D.
And more than anything else, as I think comes across in these interviews, I share just the greatest affection for Tom. He can be rough around the edges, and when I ask Tom a dumb question, boy, do I get an earful about it. And he'll always tell you, I'm sorry, I'm just a Jersey boy, I just don't know how to sugar coat it. But I don't know how to express my gratitude towards Tom other than the way I probably do so in this podcast. And I really wanted to do this to share so much of the knowledge that Tom has given me with so many other people. There's obviously been such an interest in understanding this space, as I think I probably allude to in this podcast. Back in 2011, 12, and maybe even into 13, I wrote a nine part guide on cholesterol called The Straight Dope to Cholesterol. It was about 30,000 words. It was quite a lot of work. Obviously could not have done that without Tom's help.
And to this day, Tom is probably the single most important clinical mentor that I have.
In this first episode, which is probably gonna be a little bit longer than the others, this is where I'm gonna really kind of introduce you to what I call the national treasure. And that's just the way I described Tom. He is just a national treasure. And I am not the only one to say that. You ask any card carrying lipidologist who they look to as their go-to guy on education, and it's gonna be Tom.
We talk about some of the definitions of things, but we actually start by talking about things about Tom's personal life that most people don't know. His obsessions, firefighting, hockey, and ultimately lipids, and there's a common thread to Tom's obsessions. He's an amazing author and illustrator, and we talk a little bit about some of that stuff and his gift to teaching. So in many ways, the first episode is the soft one. This is the one that kinda gets you warmed up, gets you ready to think about what we're about to do. And then in episodes two through five, we get into sort of the more technical stuff. The other thing I just wanna say for this episode, as some of you may recall for the episode with Dave Feldman, we splurged on getting a transcript so that we could really make this technical information available. Tom was so kind to go through and edit and correct all the things that Dave and I had said incorrectly, which is invariably gonna happen in a long podcast. And he also did the same thing for this podcast. So when this podcast came out, I wanna say it was 80,000 words or 90,000 words. It's basically a book, medium-sized book. Tom went through with a fine-tooth comb and made all of the corrections there. So what you'll also find in the show notes is sort of an editorialized, corrected version of the transcript. I think it is safe to say that you could learn more in the next seven hours, meaning episodes one through five, than you would learn in a lipid fellowship. And I suspect that many people who are studying in a lipid fellowship will find great value in this. That's the level of detail we go into. And at the same time, if you're a patient, if you're a primary care physician, I think you will still find this incredibly valuable. So this was a little more work than usual to prepare for it, to record it, to edit it, to break it down, to do all of the things we did. But I believe it's worth it, and I am so happy to have been able to have done this because I think of, there are a few things that I get more pleasure out of than sharing Tom's knowledge with other people. So with that, welcome to episode one of The Week of Dayspring.