The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #320 - Siim Land

TRANSCRIPT

Siim Land
Heart disease is the biggest cause of death in the world. One-third of people will die to some form of cardiovascular disease.

As a man, it's much more important to stay in better fitness and metabolic health and body composition than women. We can minimize our risk of chronic diseases and increase our life expectancy with lifestyle. That will only take us so far. It's not going to take us beyond 120.

You know, for every 100-year-old person who smokes, there's tens of millions of smokers who died in their sixties.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying here in.

So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this. Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Friends, it is such an honor to have Seamland back on the show. He is truly one of the OGs when it comes to everything biohacking and the pursuit of longevity. He is honestly brilliant. His books blow me away with the insane amount of science and detail and knowledge he brings to this sphere. And in today's episode for his book, The Longevity Leap, we dive deep, deep, deep into all things longevity. We talk about the secrets of centenarians and super centenarians and what makes them so special. Whether or not the benefits of fasting are only due to calorie restriction. I know that is a hot debate. Whether or not you should follow a low carb or low fat diet, the benefits of low cholesterol, how marriage and children affects lifespan, are there benefits to smoking and nicotine, the future of longevity, and so much more.

The show notes for today's episode will be at Melanie Avalon.com slash longevity leap. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, I have biohackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life, comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love. And then check out my Instagram, find the Friday announcement post. And again, comment there to enter to win something that I love. All right, without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Seamland.

Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I'm about to have. It is with a multiple times repeat guest, somebody I've been following in the biohacking sphere, honestly for years and years since, really since I even got into all of this. I'm here with the incredible Seamland for his newest book and it is called The Longevity Leap, a guide to slowing down biological aging and adding healthy years to your life. And Seam has quite a few books and this book definitely lives up to all of his prior work. It is, oh my goodness friends, it is the Bible of all the information you could ever want about longevity, things that affect our actual age, our biological age, all the things that people love like hormesis and what we can see in long-lived populations and longevity supplements and diet and different types of dietary fat and cholesterol and all the different things that the diseases of aging and it's really,

Melanie Avalon
really mind-blowing. So there's no way we can even remotely touch on it.

I'm just, I'm really, really, really referring people to get this book. They can easily search for all the different topics. So I literally have like 30 pages of notes. I might just ask my super random questions I have about it, but Seam, thank you so much for being here.

Siim Land
Yeah, I'm happy to be here and glad you like the book.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I did. It's as per usual. It's such a deep dive. And I'm just always so impressed by how you just everything that you do with your research.

Actually, that's a good question to start with. When you sit down to research any one topic or write about a topic, going into it, do you have a pretty good idea of what you're going to find? Because you're so you've been doing this for so long. So is it more like you have the ideas and then you find the research is supported? Or is it more? Actually looking for the answers as you're writing it.

Siim Land
Well, I definitely shouldn't like even if I do have some preconceived notions about a particular topic, I shouldn't let it be crystallized and dogmatic. So whenever I am researching some new topics about it, or new things about a particular topic, then I typically do find new insights. And you might have to change my mind about certain things, you know, update my belief systems or not belief systems, but the factual understanding about certain topics.

So when I'm researching a book, then I typically like divide them into these multiple chapters, and each chapter, you know, focuses on each individual topic. And I just read a lot about that particular topic and spend days going through a lot of studies. Usually, if I find like a meta analysis or like a review article about a particular topic, then that makes it a lot easier. Because those review articles tend to already summarize a lot of the narrative and ideas about this topic. And I still go into like individual studies as well, with multiple angles to a particular topic, you can find some nice studies to support a particular claim. And you also find some studies that don't support it. So you need to try to analyze that and figure out, okay, what are the like pros and cons of each study and then come to some sort of a conclusion.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, you're really good at that in your writing and, you know, noting where there's nuance and conflicting opinions. And actually you even referenced, you referenced a study about studies that I hadn't even seen that was commenting on the potential credibility of epi, epidemiological data compared to, I think compared to like randomized controlled trials and how there was actually a lot of benefit there, like that they were pretty comparable.

And actually to that point, I have so many directions I want to go with this. I'll just briefly say like the chapter on cardiovascular disease risk and, you know, cholesterol levels and LDL and HDL. I really appreciated that chapter because I feel like especially in the, in like the biohacking world and like the keto world and the low carb world, there's a lot of intense opinions about cholesterol. And it was really nice to read your takedown. So maybe we can we can get into that. But quick question before that, because last time I brought you on, I should probably check. It was a few years ago now. When did you get married?

Siim Land
I got married in 2022, it was almost three years ago.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, well congratulations. I'm pretty sure you were on before that.

So I'm super curious because you have a whole section on relationships and longevity. And your wife, is she around the same age as you? Yeah. Okay. What did you find with relationships and marriage and longevity in your book?

Siim Land
Yes, there is a very consistent link between having good relationships and longevity. The reason for that probably has to do with many things, even down to the simple thing that when you fall as an old person, then there will be someone to call the ambulance or someone reminds you to take your medications or whatever, like these very practical things that will help a person to live for longer. But there's also obviously mental health benefits and happiness benefits and purpose related benefits that if you have someone else to live for, whether that be a partner or children, grandchildren, or even a dog or some religion or something like that, the research does suggest that there is like a causal link between having a purpose and a why or a reason to live and longevity. So it does have a positive effect on your physical health as well.

And the same applies to relationships apparently, that there's a physical benefit to good social relationships and not just the mental health side. When it comes to men and women, then it actually seems like men benefit more from marriage and partnership when it comes to longevity. For women, there's a weaker association between relationships and marriage and longevity. But for men, it's a lot stronger. Maybe it's because women already live slightly longer than men, so like about five to 10 years longer than men on average. So maybe they've already, you know, let's say reaped a lot of the potential benefits from relationships when it comes to the other things that these other genetic or sex differences have already given them a lot of the longevity benefits so they don't gain additional advantages. Whereas for men, there are those reasons why men tend to live shorter than women, probably with, you know, poorer lifestyle, some hormonal differences, higher rates of heart disease, alcohol, and riskier behaviors, etc. So there might be some, let's say, drop off effects from these relationships and marriage later in life that mitigate some of those increased risk men experience.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. I thought that chapter was so interesting.

You even said at one point. So basically, and like with the age gap difference, basically for men, it benefited to marry younger, right? But for women, not, not so much.

Siim Land
Yeah, there is a men gain the best benefit from younger spouses. And women, there's no difference, if I remember correctly.

And you know, perhaps the reason men gain benefits more from younger spouses for longevity would be maybe that they would live longer. So like if you have a significantly older wife, then that wife would potentially die sooner as well. So maybe there is someone about that effect. I would presume that would be the reason.

Melanie Avalon
Gotcha. The kids thing. I'm, I'm haunted by the kids thing because I personally don't think that I want to have kids. So I'm always really curious how it affects and relates to longevity.

So I'm curious what you found there. I loved, I've been quoting this study to people. You mentioned a study in, in the Amish, was it their longevity or their happiness that was increasing.

Siim Land
for men up to 14 kids was linked to a great pregnancy. But for women, it was something like four to five or something, something like slightly less than for men. So there is a physical biological burden that your body goes through when you're pregnant. And maybe if you have 10 kids or something, then there might be some effect on the speed of biological aging.

Because if you look at these epigenetic age clock tests, then during pregnancy, the biological age does increase based on those tests. Now, I don't know how accurate these tests are, but during pregnancy, your body goes through certain changes. If you do it 10 times in your life, then maybe there is some negative effects on maximum lifespan. But generally speaking, having kids is associated with longevity, multiple kids. But is it because if you have kids and grandkids, then later in your life, so a lot of the problem with this research is that at what time point are we talking about? So if you're 80 years old, then you'll have someone who takes care of you, like grandchildren and children. And a lot of regular elderly people, they might have more financial struggles. They might have disabilities and comorbidities that prevent them from taking care of themselves that properly. So they are just at a high risk of negligence or not being taken care of. And having kids and grandkids is one way to offset that risk. So that might be one of the reasons why kids are associated with increased longevity in the general population. Of course, there might be some individual differences. Everyone can decide what they want to do with their life. Biologically speaking, there is always the saying that getting kids ages you because you can't sleep that well, you'll have a lot more stress and worry and etc. They require a lot of financial assistance as well to raise kids. So there's always the counter argument that don't have kids because of all these reasons. But based on all the research, it's the opposite that these kids actually will be a bigger predictor of your longevity later in life. For various reasons.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, the thing I wonder about it is, at least for the woman, because supposedly or apparently our purpose is to have children, is there any sort of extension of the biological age clock because if a woman hasn't had a child, is the body still waiting to have a child? So I just wonder if it would increase longevity from that perspective.

Siim Land
What we do know is that women who have children later in life do have better longevity, probably because if you are able to have children in your 40s and mid 40s, you are generally healthier as well. So it's maybe not a causal effect that is a little more like a survivorship bias, that all the women who are able to have children in their mid 40s, then they're just healthier to begin with, and they are aging already slower biologically.

There is a deadline for getting children for women, and they're not going to be able to do it after menopause. Some women inter-menopause later than others, I think that is associated with better longevity and slower biological aging to inter-menopause a little bit later, and early menopause is often associated also with accelerated biological aging and shorter longevity. So if someone is able to have children later, then that is a good sign. To my knowledge, I don't think we can say that just having kids later, so in your mid 40s, that it immediately would mean that you will live longer, or that is the reason why it is so. It's probably the reason that the woman who is able to have children in their mid 40s is healthier to begin with.

Melanie Avalon
right? Yeah, like causation correlation.

You mentioned the benefit of like grandparents, but there's specifically like the grandmother hypothesis. So what's the difference with the like, why is the grandmother potentially more valuable when she's older?

Siim Land
Yeah, well, you know, we evolved and hunt together tribes in nature, elderly people aren't particularly useful, you know, like this ancestral environment, they're not able to do that much physical labor. They can hunt, you know, they might gather things, they can do certain household chores in the tribe.

Right. So what is the evolutionary reason why humans are able to live into their 70s and 60s and 80s? So the one of the hypotheses is that elderly people are able to take care of grandchildren so they can assist with raising kids. And you know, humans have a very long development developmental period, you know, where for, you know, multiple years, dependent of our parents, you know, kids, even 10 year olds, even 14 year olds aren't able to survive themselves in nature alone. So they need to be grown up with parents and the grandparents potentially help just with that they help to grow or raise their children.

Melanie Avalon
In the beginning of the book, you actually talk about your personal story and what you experienced with your family. So maybe you could tell listeners a little bit about that.

So what was your experience growing up with your family and health? And I have a question about something you said. You said that you've never been sick. Do you mean a chronic type sickness or do you mean you've never been like sick, like had a cold?

Siim Land
I mean, obviously, I've got a cold. Sometimes, maybe once a year, I do have a fever for one to two days, but I've never been sick in terms of any chronic disease or any medical health ailment.

Melanie Avalon
What made you interested in health and longevity? It's such a, I mean, clearly I'm into it as well. So what gets us here? What was your experience like growing up?

Siim Land
Yeah, so I was into fitness after high school. I got into strength training and dieting and tracking nutrition and those things. And at some point, I decided also to take preventive health more seriously. And the reason was looking back because my grandfather died to colorectal cancer when he was 36. And I didn't want to increase my risk of some chronic disease later in life with a more reckless or careless lifestyle.

And the 36 is very young for colon cancer. I guess it made me realize that I don't have possibly exceptional genetics for longevity or cancer. So it's not something that I'm immune to. So I need to take it a bit more seriously if I do want to live longer and reach a very high age. Another reason I'm interested in longevity is because of studying anthropology and being interested in the human species and human development. As an anthropologist, I'm interested in this idea of life extension. And what would it entail? First of all, how do we actually do that? It's a very scientifically very fascinating question. It's one of the hardest problems humans have ever been puzzled with. It's just fascinating for me to try to think about it and try to find a solution to that. So how do you slow down aging? How do you extend lifespan with the current means? And in the future, what would it entail if we do ever find some solution? What would society look like if rather than living to, let's say mid 80s, we would live to 150 on average? That would be pretty insane, double the life expectancy. That would change society quite a lot. And it would obviously cause a lot of problems. But I think it also has a lot of positives to it. So I'm just curious and interested in that part of the question.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, the anthropology background is perfectly paired with all of it. I'm, I'm curious.

So as the years go by and as you do all this research, especially with this incredible book and all of the information contained therein and, and what you just mentioned with, you know, how things evolve and technology and findings about longevity, do you think the answers for extending lifespan are like, where do they mostly lie? Is it in more foundational things that everybody can do like diet and fitness? Is it in, you know, more specific biohacking type protocols? Is it in, you know, supplements like, you know, rapamycin? Is it in something that's not even invented yet and like gene therapy and stuff like, like, where do you think the main answers are for people?

Siim Land
Currently, the only answer we have is a lifestyle that we can minimize our risk of chronic diseases and increase our life expectancy with lifestyle. But that will only take us so far. It's not going to take us beyond 120, which is thought to be the limit for human lifespan currently. So most people with a good lifestyle and a little bit of luck and minimizing unnecessary risks in their life, with that kind of approach, they can easily live to their 90s, maybe to hundreds within the next 10, 20 years. But yeah, it's not going to be like a dramatic shift in life expectancy for us to really move the needle.

We're talking people living over 100 and over 120. For that, maybe rapamycin or some other analogous neuroprotective drugs, maybe those will help to move us closer to that. But to really make us live to 150, 200, 250, we need something way more and dramatically, something related to gene editing or whole body replacement. So starting to replace organs, growing artificial organs and replacing them, that kind of thing. So currently, we don't know what it would look like because we would have probably already done it. But when I talk about longevity, then I'm currently able to say only that you can modify your chronic disease risk and make you live a little bit longer in terms of a health span and a few extra years to your life expectancy. So these things are not something that will make you immortal or make you live significantly longer. But they are something that will increase your likelihood of living until we figure something out that will move the needle a lot more. So if you're alive for the next 10, 20, 50 years, your likelihood of reaching some sort of technological breakthrough increases. Whereas if you're very reckless with your lifestyle, you're like speed running life, you might pass away before something like that happens. So the way I like to think about it is, if you were to be 100% certain that in the year 2035, we will reach this breakthrough that a lot of scientists believe that we will, then you would just live in a basement and not fly, never fly, and not do anything risky. You would just live for the next 10 years as a hermit, just to make sure that for the next 200 years, so that you will be able to live for the next 200 years, if you just suffer for 10 years. But if it's 100% certainty, you would do that. Even like 90% certainty, many people would do that. But currently, I would say the likelihood of us reaching that breakthrough within the next 10 years is maybe 2% or something like that. It's obviously good and important to follow a healthy lifestyle. I guess there's no rational reason to be super neurotic about it. It's also important to enjoy life because like I said, the likelihood of us reaching this breakthrough is only I would say maybe 1% or 2%. Whereas if it was a 90% or 100%, then yeah, it would be smart to just be ultra healthy and super strict with your lifestyle and take no risks for the next 10 years.

Melanie Avalon
two thoughts there. One, that's a really interesting question. I have actually never thought about that.

Like if, if I knew for certain, like in 10 years or even five years that there was going to be some breakthrough, I'm just wondering like how much I would, I feel like everything I do right now, I feel pretty good about. And then like the hermit comment, like, yeah, would I, would I take less risk, just risk with like driving or going on, you know, traveling? I don't know. Do you think, if you knew for certain, like five years or 10 years, would you, would you change anything you're doing right now?

Siim Land
Well i wouldn't you know fly probably flying flying is not very safe but there is still non zero chance you know i could i could not fly for the next five ten years i don't think it would be like that big of a deal.

Melanie Avalon
No skydiving.

Siim Land
I think you need to have some balance in life and it's important to also find enjoyment in skydiving or drinking or things like that, so I wouldn't do it anyway, but something else like that, flying for vacation, you're going to have a good time, so it's worth it right now, because the likelihood of it being risky is very small, there's no huge upside as well to not travelling as of now.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, honestly getting in a car is probably one of the most dangerous things and it's just so like where you live in Estonia, do you travel by car lot or is it more like walkable or bike biking or

Siim Land
We do have a car, we don't drive with it like every day because everything is pretty close, the gym is walkable, the store is walkable, so you know most of the days I'm in my routine that you know I don't actually go any long any further away than like one kilometer from my house for most of the days you know I might drive a few times a week some shorter distances.

Melanie Avalon
I find it really interesting, because you were mentioning about it's important to still have fun in life and not be neurotic, and I think people will often look to centenarians and supercentenarians, which I love studying and learning about, and you talk about them a lot in the book, and a lot of them will credit their longevity to a lot of their bad habits actually. Like, oh, smoking, drinking, eating, all the things.

And then I think people will be like, people will use that as an example, saying, well, look at these centenarians doing this, so clearly that must be fine, when really I feel like it's actually saying the opposite in a way, because the way I interpret it is these people have genes, like the perfect combination of genes that just so protects them from the aging concepts in their body that they can do these things, and there's no effect. So for those of us who don't have that lovely symphony of genes, we probably actually need to be even more in control of our lifestyle habits. Do you have thoughts on that?

Siim Land
Yes for someone to live over the age of a hundred that's already like an exceptional accomplishment so centenarians already make up 0.0001% of the population so for someone to reach that age then they do have to have something additional that works in their favor.

The studies are when you look at their lifestyles then they're not a lot different from their peers so they have the same diets they have the same lifestyle as pretty much everyone around them you know they're not doing something miraculous in terms of their routines. They do you know have close relationships they have a pretty healthy diet but you know they don't have some sort of a modern abomination of some sort of a you know these influencer diets or social media diets they don't have a carnivore diet they don't have a vegan diet they don't have a you know pay the diet or something like that they just eat a lot of different foods and you know yeah they also eat some processed foods and ice cream and cookies and those kind of things so they just have a pretty good genetics and smoking is another thing that people like to bring up that you know have this smoking uncle who lived to a hundred years old etc but you know for every 100 year old person who smokes there's tens of millions of smokers who died in their 60s so it's a very false conclusion and there's actually one study from 2004 that I found recently that looked at all the centenarians in Rome which is they were had 157 centenarians they found that 83 percent of them never smoked 13.5 were former smokers only 2.7 were active smokers so even among all the centenarians the smokers make up a super minority and if you you know we realize that again to reach the age of 100 it's already extremely low likelihood to begin with so that same study was done in Rome back then in 2004 there was like 2.5 million people in Rome and out of those there was only 157 were centenarians so that's like 0.0062 percent of the population of Rome were centenarians and these 2.7 percent of the 157 centenarians were smokers so out of all the people the 2.5 million people in Rome 0.00017 percent were 100 year old smokers so we're talking about like an extreme super minority of people who wear smokers and over the age of 100 so yeah it's often this anecdotal evidence makes a lot of headlines good headlines but yeah the realities are you know pretty clear that smoking definitely isn't a longevity hack and a lot of the times these centenarians they they would have made it to 100 doing almost anything else as well like it doesn't really matter if they smoked or not but most of them still don't smoke

Melanie Avalon
Speaking of, do you ever use nicotine as like a supplement or a patch?

Siim Land
I use nicotine gum every once in a while, but not very often.

Melanie Avalon
I love nicotine. I use the nicotine patch, but like a very, very small dose. And I don't know, I guess I read the good stuff about it, like the, you know, the cognitive protective aspects of it, and it gives me a little dopamine hit. And it's such a small amount that if I don't like, if I forget to put it on, I don't notice, but I still like it. So

Siim Land
Yeah, I think nicotine does have no tropic benefits. Whether or not it has neuroprotective effects and reduces the risk of dementia is not clear, but I think that it's definitely a no tropic.

With that, just the amounts and frequency matters in high doses. I think it's something like over 10 milligrams a day. It has vasoconstrictive effects, so it reduces blood flow and can increase blood pressure. But in small doses, I want 2 milligrams a day tends to not be a problem.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I take a 14 and I divide it by 4, so I do like 3.5 and that's like slow release over the day, 3.5 milligrams a day.

Also with the centenarians, so you talk about there's three profiles, there's the survivors, the delayers and the escapers. So what's happening there and why are there more men that are escapers?

Siim Land
Yeah, so this particular study was done in Denmark. They discovered that the centenarians could be categorized into three groups. The survivors were the ones who were diagnosed with a particular chronic disease before the age of 80, and they still reached the age of 100. So they got kidney disease or hypertension or heart disease before 80, but they still survived until 100. Then you had the delayers. These delayed the onset of chronic disease until 80 and then reached the age of 100. And the last group was escapers. These avoided all these chronic diseases until the age of 100. So these are like the healthiest of the healthiest in terms of healthspan. The vast majority of all the centenarians belonged into the delayer or the escaper group.

So only like 13% of centenarians belonged in the survivor group. Now that's good and bad news. The good news is that if you are diagnosed with a particular co-morbidity or chronic disease before the age of 80, you still have a chance of reaching the age of 100. So it's not like once you get some disease before 80 that it's game over and you'll never reach 100.

You know, 13% chance based on this study to reach centenarian hood. The bad news is that the most effective, most reliable method to reach the age of 100 is to try to delay these chronic diseases and get them as late as possible. So ideally after the age of 80 and in a perfect world after the age of 100. And the reason men were more likely to be in the escaper group was that men have shorter life expectancy than women and women are significantly more likely to reach the age of 100 than men. The ratio between 100 year old men and women is something like 9 to 1 favoring women. So there's like a very small amount of men who live to the age of 100 to begin with. So someone, so centenarian men, they need to be healthy from a much earlier age. So they will probably die sooner if they get a chronic disease early in life. So they won't reach the age of 100 if they get a chronic disease before the age of 80. So as a man, it's much more important to stay in better fitness and metabolic health and body composition than women.

The reasons why it is so is not clear. Some people think that it's estrogen that protects women against heart disease mostly until menopause. So women have four to five decades of their life with very low atherosclerotic, this plaque burden, whereas it only starts to kick off after menopause. Whereas men, it starts at much earlier for them. So they accumulate this atherosclerotic plaque already at a much younger age. So they reach the critical thresholds of heart disease and cardiovascular events much sooner. So that's why they die at a younger age as well compared to women. That's one of the theories. And another theory is hormones as well, that men have higher androgens and testosterone that have a negative effect on lifespan. So there is some very interesting studies about eunuchs. So castratus, men who are castrated live longer than regular men for some reason. So they produce less testosterone, and maybe that's one of the reasons.

Siim Land
But it's not a very quality evidence, but that's one of the theories that this testosterone and androgen, especially DHT and others, they might accelerate aging in men or increase the risk of heart disease mostly.

Melanie Avalon
So basically to recap, if you're a survivor, if you get a chronic disease earlier in life, it's less likely that you'll become a centenarian. That's why there's less survivors, but it is still possible.

Does any disease qualify? So basically, I've had anemia in the past, does that mean I'm automatically, if I become a centenarian, I'm automatically in the survivor category?

Siim Land
I don't think anemia counts as a chronic disease. I mean, anemia is associated with increased mortality, but that's possibly because of other things. It's not something that leaves a permanent imprint in your biology the same way smoking or diabetes would, or kidney disease or something like that. So, once you fix anemia, then it doesn't have permanent damage in your physiology.

Whereas with smoking, there's the concept of pack years. The longer you smoke, the more you smoke, the more damage it causes to your body. The longer you smoke, the more pack years you accumulate, and the higher the pack years, the higher the risk of cancer and heart disease later in life. And the same for diabetes. If you get diagnosed with diabetes much earlier in life, the diet is associated with a shorter life expectancy, whereas that difference shrinks later in life. So, if you get diagnosed with diabetes when you're 80 years old, then that's associated with a much smaller reduction in life expectancy, something like maybe two years, two to three years shorter life expectancy compared to regular 80-year-olds, whereas if you get diagnosed with diabetes in your 30s, that's associated with up to 20 years shorter life expectancy compared to regular 30-year-olds.

Melanie Avalon
Gotcha. Okay.

Yeah, actually one of the most fascinating things I read in the book was, I guess it was a study, but you were saying that centenarians, in their blood markers, they tend to have actually poor kidney and liver biomarkers, but good blood glucose and triglycerides. What do you think might be indicated there, enjoying their wine?

Siim Land
Well, I mean kidney function is something that will decline naturally with age. I think it's just aware and tear of the organism. So if you're 100 years old, your kidneys have had to do a lot of work, even if you've been a healthy person, just 100 years is a long time, but with the metabolic health, it's just that they are otherwise healthy. So the only downside will be some organ failure eventually.

So you're going to have to die to something, right? Even if it's not heart disease, it's going to be some other organ failure. Kidney disease is very common. You know, there's going to be some cause of death at the extreme of life. So if you're 115, 120 years old, then you'll cause of death is most likely to be just aging itself or some organ failure, because of the wear and tear. So that's, you know, the reason there's this hypothetical limit to the human life expectancy that the body just wears itself out. Now, some people think that the limit is actually 150, that we are capable of sustaining the organism until the 150, 50 years of age. But so far, no one has, you know, reached that the longest living person is john comment, who lived to the age of 122. She's, yeah, like an extreme outlier in terms of longevity, the second person, longest living person is 119, some woman from Japan. So there's a three year gap between the first and the second longest living person.

Melanie Avalon
and you talk about the different aging clocks and problems with them, well, benefits and problems with them in the book. I was actually really interested.

I did true age diagnostic, or true, sorry, true di, there's so many different ones. I did true diagnostic, because I had Matt Dawson on the show and he's CEO of true diagnostic. And they have Omik age, the pace age with Duke and Columbia, and then symphony age from Yale. And he actually, this like blew my mind, because I always wonder if like what I'm doing is working. And he told me my pace aging score was one of the lowest ones he'd ever seen, which honestly, I do not expect. But at the same time, like I've done so many different aging clocks, like I've done that one, I've just done quite a few. And it's really interesting because a lot of them will actually conflict each other. Like with things they say, do you take stock in, not literally, but maybe, do you do aging clocks? Do you have thoughts on them? Where do you think they're going?

Siim Land
I think that i'll say what some experts like matt cabernet thinks who i think is leading longevity scientists in the world according to him their good research tools in the laboratory but these commercial clocks tend to just use uh i guess they they tried to use the same clocks but they're somehow different and these commercial clocks because of that reason are wildly inaccurate and can give you know very different results so he did like four of these tests at the same time and each test twice so he did like eight tests in in one go in the same sitting and he got very wide yeah different results even the same tests so he took the two diagnostic tests and both of them varied by something i have four or five years with the with the results there's research that the time of the day influences the results of these clocks whether or not you've been sick recently if you had some infection or some high inflammation then that will affect the results pregnancy will increase the result so there's a lot of things that just cause a lot of noise in these uh clocks these commercial clocks at least what he thinks is that these research clocks can be more useful and accurate and he believes yeah they are garbage used a lot in clinical research in the future but the commercial clocks apparently don't have the same accuracy and i tend to agree with him i've also done a few of these tests different clocks and they give all different results so you don't know which one is the most accurate like the layman will have no idea also there's a lot of variability even if you test around the same time and even if you do let's say try to find some sort of a standardized sitting then you'll never know exactly what's the best time to test it because you might have some sort of heavy metal poisoning or mold poisoning or your or something else that doesn't feel like sickness you might not feel that you're sick at all but there is some like higher inflammation status that would skew the results so it's kind of a waste of money in that case because you don't never know if this is the best time to test even if you get a result there's nothing specific that you can really do so let's say whatever result you get you know if the biological age score is five years lower than your chronological age or if it's five years higher the your lifestyle decisions will be probably the same you'll still try to you know exercise try to eat healthier try to sleep more all those things like you would just still do the same things so it doesn't really matter actually about the biological age i guess yeah like it wouldn't be fair to call them even biological age tests because they don't apparently measure biological age they measure maybe like inflammation status which is then correlated with some chronological age data yeah i wouldn't say that they're biological age clocks they're more like some inflammation status derivatives or correlations with chronological age

Melanie Avalon
Okay. So is it more viable than to like, and more accessible for people to be measuring things like CRP and homocysteine and you know, inflammatory markers?

Siim Land
There's definitely a lot more clinical evidence and a lot more other epidemiological studies and just a lot more data about regular blood markers. We know high blood sugar is bad, high inflammation is associated with pretty much all chronic diseases, high blood pressure, et cetera.

So we know a lot more about these regular blood markers, whereas with these epigenetic H clocks, there are a few studies, but the commercial tests probably don't use the exact same clocks as the research clocks are. So even then, they're still not the same as the actual research clocks. But there is one phenoH, which is calculated from something like 10 blood markers. So CRP, glucose, creatinine, white blood cells, lymphocytes, MCV, RDW, and a few others. So you can estimate your biological age with these blood markers. It's not a perfect test because obviously your blood markers will fluctuate day by day. So your biological age will also can go up and down a few years based on this test. But at least you'll have some more practical takeaway as well that you can see, OK, your kidneys or your liver is lacking. So you'll be able to do something specific about it. Whereas with a general epigenetic H clock, there's very little practical takeaway from the results.

Melanie Avalon
How often do you do your blood work?

Siim Land
Two times a year I do a comprehensive panel, so 180 markers, maybe once or twice, three, four, depending on the situation, I test some individual markers. Usually if I'm experimenting with something or if I'm tracking something specifically. I don't think everyone needs to test that much. Once a year, some core markers are well enough.

What matters more is, are you trying to improve something or is there something that needs to be fixed or improved? Someone might have blood sugar problems. For that person, it's more important to test incidence, sensitivity, and blood sugar markers more frequently to see if things are improving. Someone might be at a very high risk of heart disease because of family history or some other already present plaque or something like that. Then for them, it's more important to track their lipids and blood pressure and other inflammatory markers. It depends a lot on the individual, how often and what they should test, but some of the core markers everyone should test at least once a year would be a lipid panel, blood sugar markers, complete metabolic panel, electrolytes, liver enzymes, kidney markers, some very basic markers. It already gives you a lot of valuable information.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. And speaking of, so like I mentioned earlier, your chapter on cardiovascular disease risk and the whole complicated world of HDL, LDL, all the things was so eye-opening. I love that chapter.

Where have you landed on the arguments or, you know, discussions surrounding the cost benefit of higher cholesterol? You know, there's a lot of people in the keto world who say LDL can be high as long as HDL is high. But you pointed out some really interesting things about, you know, even high HDL can be oxidative. And what are your thoughts on this whole, this whole world? I know it's a big question.

Siim Land
Right. Well, you know, what matters is people discuss cholesterol and lipids because they are considered a risk factor for heart disease and a heart disease is the biggest cause of death in the world. One-third of people will die to some form of cardiovascular disease. So, it's not like a minor issue and that's why people tend to get heated about it, I think.

So, you know, what matters at the end of the day is do you have heart disease or not the same way with diabetes? So, like, do you have diabetes or not? So, you can eat, you know, a thousand grams of carbs a day and not get diabetes. Likewise, someone can have insanely high LDL and ApoB and not get heart disease, so not have any plaque accumulation and not have any soft plaque or hard plaque at all. But the same applies to, like, someone can smoke to 100 years old and not die. So, you know, it's like, okay, what is it? So, there's always outliers, but generally speaking, in most people, a higher amount of lipids is going to increase the risk of heart disease. And even if there are some people that it wouldn't or that the risk is not as high, then even then, like, okay, what is the cost to benefit ratio? Like, what is the risk analysis here? Like, is it something that you need to have? Do you need to have extremely high LDL and ApoB or not? You know, maybe for some people, being on a carnivore low carb keto diet helps them to stay in normal body weight and maintain normal blood sugar, and they just can't sustain any other diet. So, maybe for them, this high lipid profile might be worth it because the consequences of not following that diet would be diabetes or obesity, right?

Whereas for other people, you know, for me, at least I don't need to be on a low carb, very high fat diet to maintain normal metabolic health and normal body composition. I actually do better with a high carb diet and a lower fat diet. So, that's just me, for example. So, I don't have a physiological and a psychological reason to be following a diet that would increase my lipids and cholesterol very high for me. So, there is no, like, health benefits to having insanely high lipids, something like 300 milligrams per deciliter or even, like, 150 milligrams per deciliter isn't physiologically necessary. The physiological requirements for LDL are, you know, quite low. They look at the studies on hunter-gatherers and infants, they have very low LDL and very low APOB and other lipids, something like 70 milligrams per deciliter, which is actually considered to be, like, a very low risk of atherosclerotic plaque accumulation if your LDL is below 70 milligrams per deciliter. So, there's no physiological requirement to have insanely high lipids. Now, some people say that, oh, your brain is made of cholesterol, so therefore, having high cholesterol is somehow good for the brain. Well, the issue is that none of the cholesterol in your blood actually reaches the brain. It doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. So, your brain, yes, is made of cholesterol, but all of that cholesterol is made inside the brain.

Siim Land
It's made there with the help of insulin. So, insulin that gets demonized actually makes the cholesterol inside your brain. And the insulin sensitivity is a huge regulator of body composition or insulin sensitivity in the brain. So, central insulin sensitivity regulates your body composition, your appetite, as well as these brain cholesterol levels.

So, my opinion about it is that what I do for myself is that I want to minimize the risk of heart disease because it's the biggest killer, the biggest likelihood as a man that I will die to. So, I just want to reduce the risk. Obviously, I pay attention to all the risk factors. LDL isn't the biggest risk factor out there.

Diabetes and smoking are a significantly higher risk factor, but LDL isn't like a zero chance. It's not a zero percent risk factor either. Just having it lower in my eyes just makes more rational sense. And it's not even the LDL that is the causal factor. It's more so the ApoB that is considered to be the causal factor for plaque accumulation and heart disease. So, ApoB is this tag on the lipoproteins that get carried around in the bloodstream, and each lipoprotein can have only one ApoB tag. So, the amount of ApoB in your blood reflects the amount of lipoproteins. So, how many of these vehicles that carry lipids are in the blood. Plaque accumulation isn't determined by the amount of cholesterol. But the risk is higher with a higher amount of particles.

So the particle number is what actually leads to the plaque accumulation. So you can think of it like a traffic jam. A traffic jam isn't determined by the amount of people in an amount of area or in this cross-section. It's determined by the amount of vehicles.

So you can have two buses full of 100 people each, and those two buses aren't going to collide and cause accident. But if you have 50 vehicles with 50 individuals, then you will have a traffic accident at some point. So the amount of lipid or the amount of lipoproteins is what actually drives heart disease. And APOB is a reflection of the amount of lipoproteins in the blood. And the doctors use LDL as a screening tool mostly for assessing risk because there is a pretty good correlation between the amount of LDL and APOB. So LDL is considered like a poor man's APOB because if you have very high LDL, then it is likely that you will also have high APOB, at least in most cases.

Now, there is something like 25% of cases where it isn't the case. It's called this discordance. But it mostly happens in people with metabolic disease and diabetes. So someone with diabetes can have very low LDL, but still extremely high APOB, which is because of their metabolic condition. But in most people, otherwise healthy metabolic, healthy people, having high LDL would also correlate to a higher APOB. And a higher APOB is considered like a causal factor in heart disease. Now, of course, it's not the only risk factor, like I said. And a lot of people say that if you have low inflammation, then your risk of plaque accumulation is non-existent according to some people. But the truth is that inflammation obviously increases the risk.

Siim Land
It exacerbates the risk. So yes, if your endothelium is inflamed, then the lipoproteins are more likely to get stuck there and start to trigger this process of atherosclerosis. But it is possible to develop atherosclerosis even without inflammation. So inflammation is just something that exacerbates the risk.

And diabetes exacerbates the risk, but they are all risk factors. So my opinion is to try to minimize all the risk factors, not just one or two. I already have optimal insulinses, which in blood sugar levels, I also have optimal inflammation levels. So the last thing that I would want to optimize would be my lipids. So I want to minimize all the risk factors, not just one or two and being selective about them.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm just, I'm so fascinated by all of this. I've noticed for me, I feel like I'm looking through some of my results now. I guess, I wish I'd been testing my APO-B for longer than I have, because my LDL has fluctuated in the past a lot, and I'm curious if that would match a fluctuation in my APO-B.

Yeah, a few different thoughts here. You said it now, and you said it in the book as well, and I thought this before, I've thought about this a lot, because people, especially in the low-carbon keto world, will be like, oh, it's fine to exist in this state of really, really high cholesterol because there's no inflammation, so it's all fine. And I'm like, well, I mean, you don't know that you, what if you get into an inflammatory state tomorrow, and now there's all of this cholesterol potential to be a problem?

Siim Land
Yes, like forest fires in a dry season, you could not have a fire at all if you get lucky. But having a lot of dry wood in that forest will increase the likelihood that if there is a match that gets lit, then everything is going to burn. So the better strategy is to clear out the dry wood as much as possible and in so doing you also minimize the risk even if there is going to be a match that gets drawn.

And there was this recent Keto CTA study that looked, so like I said, what matters is do you actually get heart disease or not? And heart disease is mostly diagnosed with the presence of plaque in the arteries. So like either soft plaque or heart plaque in the calcium in the coronary arteries. But the calcium is already like this late stage event, so there's already been damage and the calcium is there to like stabilize the plaque, but it is already a characteristic that there has been damage and it is categorized as already existing heart disease. So this Keto CTA study did find that these lean mass hyper-responders as they're cold, they have high LDL, but they're relatively lean and with otherwise good metabolic health. So these individuals still had plaque progression regardless of being metabolically healthy and having low inflammation. So, you know, there's like a lot of controversy about the study and the authors are discussing it all the time online, but they didn't show that these individuals had zero plaque accumulation over the course of these two years that they were tested or however years that it was. I don't recall exactly, but yeah, the point is that they still had plaque progression despite being otherwise metabolically healthy.

Melanie Avalon
I'll have on, like, people who are really, really intense in the vegan world, like, I've had Dr. Michael Greger and Neal Bernard and people like that.

And they'll often say in their work that, like, if you follow, like, an animal-based diet at any capacity, it's going to really raise your cholesterol. I eat a lot of animal protein, but I don't eat high fat. And I mean, my LDL will be, like, in the 40s. And so I'm like, clearly, it can't be that causative. Like, it can't literally cause, like, animal protein itself, if I'm eating this much animal protein and having low LDL. But if I were to add, I'll look through my history. If I, when I go low carb and I add more fats, it does, everything does shoot up. Those are not normally animal fats. They're normally, like, coconut oil and things like that, like plant-based fats. So it's just, it's really, just really interesting.

Siim Land
Yeah, the biggest driver of increased LDL levels are saturated fat. And I think it's also the low-carb element that might raise it, or there's something related to the lipid transport that if your body neutralizes more fat for fuel, then it also has higher cholesterol levels in the blood because the cholesterol is transported in the same vehicles as fat that triglycerides.

So if you are in a low-carb or ketogenic state, then you'll just have higher LDL by virtue of being low-carb, whereas you can easily shift your cholesterol levels and lipids with insulin or raising insulin by eating something like carbs. It doesn't even have to be massive amounts of carbs, even just like a sweet potato or some broccoli or something that can probably change it already quite significantly.

Melanie Avalon
It's like that guy who did that study, that guy, I sound so specific. That guy though who did that study, I think it was last year and he added like Oreos to his low carb diet and dropped its cholesterol. It created a lot of headlines, but it sounds like that concept that you just mentioned. So that makes sense.

And then you also mentioned like people think HDL, we want it, you know, super high all the time, but you actually mentioned that it actually can be oxidative as well, especially over like, what was it? 80 or 85, I think.

Siim Land
Yeah, I think something above 100 I think is associated with increased heart disease mortality as well. But the reason probably may have to do with that if you have such high HDL, you also have high other lipids.

So it would be extremely rare to have a HDL of like 100 and LDL of 50 or something like that. But yeah, like HDL can also be oxidized. But I think the biggest risk comes from that if you have very high HDL, then you tend to have very high LDL as well.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, that makes sense. And then you also, well, speaking of something I appreciate as well, you've commented somewhere in the book that I'm paraphrasing, but basically we shouldn't be prescribing like low carb for health based on studies in sick people.

So like if low carb is fixing things and people who have issues where it fixes it, that doesn't necessarily mean we should prescribe it for everybody.

Siim Land
Yeah, you know, ketogenic diets are possibly useful for various conditions, you know, it's historically used for epilepsy, but there's some clinical trials over the last few years showing it helps with like depression or IBD and various other medical conditions. So of course, it's a medical tool that we can use for people that can benefit from it.

But let's say an otherwise healthy individual, lean, athletic, no issues with metabolic health, it doesn't make sense for them to be on that kind of a restrictive diet when there's nothing in carbohydrates or, you know, being on a non-ketogenic diet, there's nothing on a non-ketogenic diet that would be harmful to them. There's no evidence that, you know, carbohydrates in of themselves would be somehow deleterious to health in otherwise healthy people. And some of the studies yet indicate that in lean, healthy individuals, it might be more net negative because of the increased lipids. So, you know, everyone can, you know, decide what kind of a diet they follow as long as they know the risks and benefits, but more often than not, people may be on the such diets because of being misinformed or because of thinking that they need to do it. So, you know, yeah, carbohydrates aren't necessarily harmful for, you know, otherwise healthy individuals, but low carb diets can be useful tools for some conditions.

Melanie Avalon
I like that you point out the common factor between all the diets that seem to work is that they eschew whole foods, or sorry, processed foods, that they are based on whole foods. Not the store, but the type of food, something I'm dying to ask you.

So I'm also the host of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast, and we discuss this concept all the time. And for listeners, there is a huge chapter on calorie restriction and fasting and all of these things. So with fasting, this is like the million dollar question, do you think the benefits are just due to it creating calorie restriction, or is it separate from that or additional to that?

Siim Land
The animal research suggests that fasting without calorie restriction doesn't have life extension effects. So a lot of the benefits that you might see from mineral fasting comes from the achieved calorie restriction. Or I guess the more better way to say it would be that if you are doing mineral fasting but you're not calorie restricted and you know you're gaining weight and you're overrated then it's not going to have longevity benefits.

Whereas being in a semi-calorie restricted state and not gaining weight and not being obese that is what drives the benefits that you might see from mineral fasting if someone were to do it. And maybe the time of the day could be a factor. So the circadian rhythm component there is some mouse research that eating the food in the active phase, so for mice it's evening or in the nighttime but for humans it will be the daytime, that that would increase lifespan. Whereas doing the opposite of having this circadian mismatch eating at nighttime would shorten lifespan in those mice in a calorie restricted state and within mineral fasting. So there is an element of truth to mineral fasting that you don't want to be eating at the wrong time, you don't want to be eating at the middle of the night and you're going to be eating like at irregular times. But it's mostly like a tool for people to achieve a calorie deficit and to maintain a healthy body weight. So I like to do mineral fasting because it's just easy and I enjoy it and it helps me to stay to a lower calorie intake and helps me to maintain good body composition year-round. Whereas for someone else they might not experience that, they might fall off the rails with their diet, they might overeat when they break the fast, etc. So those situations would indicate it is not the more optimal way of eating for them, so they might do something else. But it's a good tool for some people to lose weight without necessarily counting calories if it is the right thing for them.

Melanie Avalon
Do you know if mice have the circadian rhythm chronotypes that we see in humans, like being like early birds and night owls?

Siim Land
I'm not exactly sure, yeah, if there are chronotypes in mice, I would, I would imagine there might be some differences between individual mice, but yeah, mice are nocturnal so that they have the flipped circadian rhythm, yeah, that they're nocturnal animals.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, the reason I'm wondering, because I know that one of the arguments for the chronotype, the sleep chronotypes is that as a species, somebody needed to be awake all the time to protect the tribe. That's, that's what I've heard.

I don't know if mice are protecting the tribe, but I'm just curious because like for me, I just gravitate towards, it's interesting to hear what you're saying about, you know, eating during the day, and I just really gravitate towards eating later, like at night. Like that's just intuitively feels good to me. And I'm always haunted perpetually by, you know, should I be a breakfast eater? Yeah, what are you like a chronotype wise?

Siim Land
Well, I'm definitely like a morning person in terms of my daytime activities. I don't eat immediately breakfast. I have my first meal of the day, which is just a protein shake at 10, 10 a.m. And my dinner is a slightly earlier. So it's a 4pm at where I have my dinner and I go to bed something like 10pm. So I think I have, I'm not like a very early, super early, more chronotype, but, you know, earlier than a lot of other, other people. So, you know, what, what I think matters is that you should try and experiment what works for you, what makes you feel the best, what helps you to achieve the best body composition and what improves your sleep the most.

So I think having good sleep is more important than any particular intermittent fasting window. So your potential negative side effects of eating too late could be or could out or say, yeah, like you don't want your eating window to disrupt your sleep quality. I think that's quite an important factor. And that differs between a lot of people. Some people like to eat later and they sleep fine. Other people need to stop eating very early. I've come to my particular eating window just through like experimentation. You know, yeah, five years ago, even I was also eating my last meal at like 8pm and 9pm or something like that, even. But I've just, you know, the biggest reason was that because I got married. So my wife wants to have a slightly earlier dinner. We started with 6pm, we did 5pm, then we both like, hey, actually 4pm feels pretty good. I now like, now I like to go to bed with a slightly emptier stomach. So I've gotten used to it and I actually prefer it now after changing it over the course of multiple years or gradually. But yeah, like there's no clear research that one is better or the other. Now, there is research that morning chronotypes, so people who wake up slightly earlier have a lower mortality and lower risk of heart disease. But, you know, that's obviously can be skewed by this healthy user bias that people who go to bed very late, they might have unhealthier lifestyles. They might drink and stay up late. And people who wake up early, they are these people who go out for a run and eat otherwise healthy, etc. So it's not, you know, causal relationship between chronotypes and and mortality risk. So it's hard to say like if it is actually important to be a morning person or not, I wouldn't say that everyone needs to change their chronotype based on that research. But I would say that, yeah, just pay attention to your sleep and try to optimize your nutrition around your sleep because it's quite important. It's a very important aspect of health and longevity.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I wonder if I... Yeah, because I just love sleep. As of right now, I perceive that I cannot sleep on an empty stomach. So I wonder if I were to shift it earlier, if I actually would enjoy, like you said, going to sleep on an empty stomach. I don't know.

That's like such a wild concept to me.

Siim Land
you might be different and I think I sleep better and deeper if I have a slightly empty stomach but yeah some people just can't do it so.

Melanie Avalon
i will say on the sleep factor one of my favorite studies that you found this is really good to read it was a twenty twenty three study. I was looking at five favorable sleep factors to increase life expectancy by four point seven years and men in two point four years and women and so they were for the audience number one sleeping seven to eight hours per night number two.

having difficulty falling asleep less than or equal to two times a week so you can still have trouble falling asleep two times a week three trouble staying asleep less than or equal to two times a week not using sleep medication and then five feeling well rested after waking up greater than or equal to five times a week so basically you don't have to have perfect sleep to see. the increase in life expectancy I still say get all the sleep but like reading this I don't know it's really helpful because I think people can get neurotic about sleep.

Siim Land
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a kind of a pendulum swing and that the people neglected sleep 10 years ago, but now everyone is very obsessed with sleep. So yeah, the truth is that sleep is important and you need to try to sleep as well and as long as you know, you can, because life gets in the way and you're going to not sleep well, and not as long occasionally.

So if you can just then just don't restrict your sleep as well and as long as you can whenever you can, because otherwise you'll still develop a deficit over time because of life that happens, but you don't need to be 100% perfect with your sleep. So the reason you would want to be trying to be perfect is just to kind of bank your sleep and have a good accumulation of sleep before you get sleep deprived because of life. But yeah, there's nothing that if you sleep five hours a night on some nights that it somehow depletes your sleep bank or like depletes your life expectancy somehow that if you have one bad night's sleep or even like one restless, completely sleepless night, then it doesn't mean that you're cutting your life short immediately.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I think it can be really helpful for people. I mean, I'm all about sleep and like trying to optimize it.

It's just helpful to know that it's okay. If every now and then you have some some issues.

Siim Land
Yeah. And naps, naps are like a very cool and good thing to counteract that.

So people who take slightly shorter naps or less than 30 minutes, even if done multiple times a week, they have a lower mortality and lower heart disease compared to people who take very long naps as over the up to one and a half hours. So like short naps are very useful and great ways to mitigate some of sleep loss and increase your sleep reserve.

Melanie Avalon
Do you take naps?

Siim Land
Yeah, I take like almost every other day I go through like, yeah. So some, some periods I go through like every day, some periods I go to like a month without an episode, depending on just how, how much sleep am I getting at the night?

Melanie Avalon
So my hack, I call it my sauna nap because I have the sunlight and solo unit that you lie down in. So I'll take a nap in my sauna and it's kind of like getting a detox, cardiovascular exercise while sleeping.

It works really well for me.

Siim Land
That's yeah, nice.

Melanie Avalon
Just to put a bow on the fasting thing, I did ask for questions for you, but I knew I wouldn't get to like any of them because I had all my own questions, but I have this question as well. Marissa wanted to know, are incorporating longer fasts, meaning over 24 or 36 hours on a weekly basis, helping or harming longevity?

And I know you did conclude in your book that there's not a ton of data showing or you can let me know what you found about data for fasting over 24 hours, like the benefits.

Siim Land
Yeah, there's not a lot of studies on that in otherwise healthy people. There are some medical fasts for multiple days, but you can't make any, let's say, longevity conclusions from that for healthy people, because they're usually done in overweight individuals. And there are studies about these fasting-mimicking diet and alternative fasting that also show that they lower blood pressure, lower blood sugar, lower cholesterol, lower body weight, et cetera. But how big of an effect would it have in otherwise healthy individuals already that we can't know?

So it's very hard to obviously do lifespan studies in humans, it's pretty much impossible, especially something with fasting or a diet. But the animal research suggests that fasting in of itself without any calorie restriction wouldn't extend lifespan. It would only do so if you're also calorie restricted at the same time, but calorie restriction without immuno-fasting would give the same results. So the most important thing is to not be overweight, not to be diabetic, not have high amounts of body fat and visceral fat and high amounts of other medical or metabolic ailments. I think that's the most important takeaway.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, and just to mention that when you're speaking about the calorie restriction, you also pointed out a really interesting study that talked about how intermittent calorie restriction was superior to continual calorie restriction, which is pretty, pretty interesting and fast to think about.

What's the longest fast you've done?

Siim Land
I've done seven days, I think it was six years ago, seven years ago.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. Was it a good experience or were you like, I'm not doing this again?

Siim Land
Well, of course, it's a very interesting experience, mostly that you realize that nothing happens if you don't eat even multiple days. So it can be useful, I guess, exposure therapy for some people who might need it. But yeah, I don't like miss it either. You know, I don't think it's already necessary.

And I think that some people probably will find them more useful. So some individuals might like the idea of doing alternative fasting more than just eating less every day. But other people, you know, I guess, prefer to have smaller meals and just restrict calories on a daily basis rather than to not eat at all. I think most people would find that option easier. But some other individuals, you know, they, okay, I'll just do a three day fast once a month or once a week, and that will be enough for me to lose weight and I can eat whatever else. And other times. So yeah, it depends a lot on the individual. But you know, I guess the risk here is the muscle preservation. I don't think you'll lose muscle with a two or three day fast. If you're younger, it might be problematic if you're older, so like 60s or 70s, I wouldn't really recommend extended fast for people that age. But if you're, you know, less than 40 or in your 40s, you can easily get away with multi day fasting and not lose muscle and just lose a lot of body fat. But you know, is it worth it depends a lot on the individual.

Melanie Avalon
I mean, I feel like that's the theme of our other show. We're just like, you have to find what works for you, which always feels like a cop-out answer, but it's so true about the bio-individuality of everything.

Siim Land
you know, you can, you can like, you know, so like most people aren't going to do like Texas scans and see if they lose muscle or not between their fasts. So, so it's hard to say if they are moving in the right direction or not, unless they're doing it for multiple years, and then you can see some trends.

So if you otherwise progressing at the gym, and you're otherwise progressing in your body composition, and you're progressing your metabolic health and biomarkers, then you probably don't need to change. But if things are heading in the wrong direction, you are progressively getting weaker, you're not progressing at the gym, you're feeling more tired and your body composition doesn't get better, you actually become more skinny fat, then that's like a sign that you're heading in the wrong direction.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, exactly. Well, you end, I think you, maybe it was, I'm not sure if it was the last chapter, somewhere near the end, you talk about purpose and gratitude and like mindset, how that all affects longevity. So I'm curious, and for listeners, we only like barely skim the service of everything in this book. So definitely go get it now.

What have you identified as your your life purpose?

Siim Land
My life purpose as an anthropologist, it was to safeguard the transition in the development of the human species so that we don't mess things up in the next few decades with AI and life extension technologies, but as a human being, as a regular human being, it is to just live my life with my friends and family and my wife and to leave the world like a better place than it was before.

Melanie Avalon
Well, you're definitely doing that and I just have to ask, I'm really curious. So do you think we're doomed with AI or do you think when you think about the future?

Siim Land
I don't think we're doomed i think it's going to be like a net positive in many aspects.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, that's good. I mean, because I use it like daily and I just wonder if it's taking notes. I feel like I'm probably on its bad list because I call it out on a lot of things. I cannot handle it when it like hallucinates and stuff. So I don't know. I'm normally a very nice person, but I'm not very nice to AI.

So oh dear. Well, this has been absolutely amazing. Again, friends, get the longevity leap. It will blow your mind on all things aging, extending your life, adding healthy years, all the things.

Are you, are you writing another book now?

Siim Land
Yeah, I'm writing a book with, uh, so this is a, a co-project again. It's with Dr. James DeNickel Antonio and, uh, my wife were three of us writing a book about supplements. Uh, so it's like, uh, going to be like an encyclopedia of supplements. So it's not like a narrative book.

It's about, okay. Each chapter is a, each supplement. And what does the research say about that supplement?

Melanie Avalon
Oh, that will be very helpful. Well, I'd love to have you back, any of you guys, for that because that sounds awesome. And yeah, like I said, a really good resource. Well, thank you so much.

The last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I do appreciate mindset a lot, which by the way, Seem does talk about in the book, and you can improve or enhance or increase your positive mindset if you're not naturally inclined that way. What is something that you're grateful for?

Siim Land
Right now I'm grateful that I can do my work and not have to struggle for survival as a lot of people did in the past. So I think right now is the best time to be alive despite what the impression people might get on social media.

I think now is the much better time to be alive than even a hundred years ago.

Melanie Avalon
I cannot agree more. I think about this all the time, like things were wild back then.

And one of my favorite fun facts is, you know, like margins on paper, like the margins, do you know why they're why they're there?

Siim Land
to not write over all the margins.

Melanie Avalon
So they are there because it used to be so common that you would leave your papers out at night and rats would eat your paper, eat the sides of the paper that they started adding margins to allow for the rats to eat the paper. Like that's how, that's how, and it wasn't that long ago.

Like we have a really good now, you know. We're not going to bed with like rat infested houses and you know, like you said, struggling to survive and so in any case, thank you so much. I am so grateful for everything that you're doing. I eagerly always look forward to your books and you're really, like you said, leaving the world a better place. So thank you, thank you. Thank you for your time and would love to have you back in the future.

Siim Land
Yeah, it was great to talk with you and thank you.

Melanie Avalon
Have a good night. You too. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X. Please visit MelanieAvalon.com to learn more about today's guest. And always feel free to contact me at contact at MelanieAvalon.com. And always remember, you got this.