#202 Birthday Q&A - Hair Health, Fixing Tendonitis, Preventing Neurodegeneration

Siim Land (0:00)

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But anyway, today I wanted to do like a podcast for my birthday, which is quite a funny thing. I like just wanting to share some information with you guys as well and just have a conversation. So we'll be doing like a Q&A about anything related to just health, fasting, diet, nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management and everything related. And also I'll be doing like a giveaway for my new book Stronger by Stress. So you're going to have to stay until the end of the live stream.

I'll ask like a question in the end and I'll just pick the first person who is going to answer it correctly and they're going to win the copy of the book. So I'll send it out for you. So yeah, in the meanwhile, we'll be doing like a regular Q&A, talk about anything like any questions you might have. So feel free to just start popping some questions. Well, first question is, what is your number one way to improve HDL? So HDL cholesterol, the quote unquote good cholesterol. Well, I think the most important thing is to just, you know, exercise and become metabolically flexible. So you want to lose weight, you want to fix insulin resistance, you want to not overeat calories and essentially fix your lipid profile. So generally, generally like a high HDL is a good thing. And, you know, some some foods necessarily may help to raise it. But I think the most important thing is to just become healthy and fix all the underlying metabolic dysfunction you might have. And, you know, my own HDL tends to be around like 60 or 70 or even like 80 sometimes milligrams per deciliter. So I don't do like any particular, particularly crazy thing to raise it. I just stick to the healthy diet. And and yeah, I just keep the weight off.

Have you tried Astragalus and Cat's Claw?

I haven't tried those ones specifically, but I do have like tried some similar other ones like all these other, you know, ginseng and berberine and, you know, turmeric, ginger, those things. I do use them every once in a while. I don't use them every day. But the kind of the main mechanism or the main benefit that you get from those things is the kind of activation of these longevity pathways like AMPK and autophagy and suppression of things like mTOR and insulin. So I would use them only on like days where I want to go into like deeper autophagy or if I'm trying to promote the clearance of like senescent cells or something like that because you don't really want to be taking them on a continuously all the time because that can lead to like some metabolic problems. And it's like the same with like metformin or rapamycin or like even like fasting. You don't necessarily want to be fasting every day all the time in terms of like fasting for several days in a row or continuously pushing the stress. So those things, these compounds, they mimic some aspects of fasting by stimulating the same pathways. So you would want to couple them with the same goals. So if a goal is like muscle growth, then they're not definitely the best things. They're only like more beneficial for the other side of the coin, which is these longevity pathways and autophagy functions.

Best solution for good health hair, please. Well, I'm not like a hair specialist and I don't like have any hair routine or something. I don't take specific care for my health because I've never had any health problems or hair problems. But generally, I think nutrition is a pretty good thing. So you would want to get all the essential nutrients, especially, you know, proteins, amino acids and fatty acids. Your hair is made of protein, basically. And yeah, just making sure that you eat enough protein or and you don't want to, you don't want to be imposing a lot of like nutrient deficiencies on yourself and or even like, you know, the calorie restriction and stress in general, like low thyroid and excess cortisol, excess stress is definitely going to promote hair loss and losing hair. Whereas, you know, exercising in moderation and fasting in moderation and eating enough calories and eating enough protein, then those things are promoting hair health. And also like specific nutrients would be made with like zinc. And yeah, magnesium is probably important for stress management, especially. So I would pay attention to that.