#216 Autophagy From Exercise and Fasting - Siim Land and Vanessa Spina

Vanessa Spina (0:00)

All right, Siim, welcome back to Fast Keto. Thank you so much for being here with us again for the second time on the show. It's great to have you back.

Siim Land (0:10)

Yeah, I'm glad to talk with you and glad to catch up.

Vanessa Spina (0:14)

How are things going where you are? Tell us a little bit about where you are in the world and how things are going there.

Siim Land (0:20)

Yeah, well, I'm in Estonia and things are pretty normal here.

For the time being, we did have like a minor, let's say, outbreak during the spring, but the summer has been pretty normal.

There's no like lockdowns. There's no like real restrictions aside from you can't organize like large events. But other than that, everything is relatively normal. And I'm living actually like on an island, so I'm even more isolated from the rest of the world. So my kind of everyday life isn't affected at all. So I'll still get to do like in my work and create content.

Vanessa Spina (1:00)

That's awesome. Well, you and I first met in a really cool location at Biohackers Summit.

And I think that was maybe in 2017 or 2018

Siim Land (1:15)

Three years ago, something.

Vanessa Spina (1:18)

And I remember you did an interview with me there and then you've gone on to be a regular speaker there. So for anyone who's listening, who may not be familiar with your work, maybe give us just a quick background on yourself and what you primarily focus on.

Siim Land (1:32)

Yeah, well, I cover a lot about the nutrition and general, this biohacking theme of how do you improve your health and performance with different kinds of strategies. I've written the last book that we talked about was Metabolic Autophagy that talks about fasting and autophagy.

I also created a new book Stronger by Stress, which is mostly focused on stress adaptation and this aspect of hormesis of how do you use different dietary strategies as well as other activities to increase your resilience against stress and actually benefit from it. But mostly I do like writing, speaking and have a YouTube channel and just create content.

Vanessa Spina (2:18)

So I know we touched on this a little bit before, but what is it that sparked your interest in biohacking?

And I know when we met you kind of were into Keto. I'm not sure if you still are, but what kind of sparked your interest in all of that?

Siim Land (2:31)

Well, it had to do mostly with my own personal interest of wanting to be healthier, wanting to be better performing and just increase my performance in both physical as well as mental.

So I don't have any health background or health disaster in the past. I've been relatively healthy all my life. It was just wanting to optimize that I do and just kind of reach my full potential as a human being.

Vanessa Spina (3:00)

You know, I think that's so cool because I find that a lot of us come to this space because we have a particular strong motivating factor.

And it's really hard if you don't have some kind of motivation, like a sickness or an illness or maybe you're overweight or something. But I really admire people who come to this space just because they're maximizers and optimizers and they just want to optimize the way they live. I think that's so cool.

Siim Land (3:27)

Yeah, like I think a lot of the times people make changes to the life if they get hit with some sort of a disease or some other accident. But I think like the smarter way of going about it is to do those things in advance before you get sick because it's harder to get well if you're already sick compared to like stay well if you're already relatively healthy.

Vanessa Spina (3:52)

Yes, I agree. Now, I want to get into autophagy a little bit because I know it's a subject that you have researched extensively and you wrote an entire book on it.

Fantastic book and it is just very well researched. There's a lot of information in there. So what are some surprising things that you learned about autophagy in all of your research for the book?

Siim Land (4:17)

Well, I think the biggest thing that like that I did learn and other people don't really let's say know is that autophagy is not just this garbage disposal system that the kind of superficial understanding is that it makes you live longer and kind of eliminates this junk material. Well, it can do that to a certain extent, but it also is involved with almost every other process in the body. Like it's involved in the immune system.