#227 Longevity Effects of Intermittent Fasting, NAD and Circadian Rhythms - Q&A

Siim Land (0:00)

All right, so, yeah. We're gonna do another Q&A livestream, but yeah, the topic is also gonna be mostly about Metabolic Autophagy, because it's been about, right about like two years since I released the book, and yeah, I think it's a really important book, at least for me, and one of the best books about the topic, in my opinion, in my humble opinion, in my unbiased opinion. But yeah, we'll wait a little bit more for people to join in, but in the meanwhile we'll also talk a little bit about what's going on.

Techology says, you 100K subs and not much in live.

Well, I've been a little bit busy over the past few weeks and months, just doing a lot in terms of creating another book with Dr. James at Tinnacle Antonio, which is I think is also gonna be an amazing book really. We actually crossed like 4,000 references as well and it's not even done yet. So yeah, it's gonna be a really good one. About this stream is gonna be mostly about metabolic autophagy, which is, you know, about intermittent fasting and that sort of thing. I will screen share from my blog as well, or yeah, from my blog. I actually, last year, when it was one year anniversary of the book, then I made like an update basically about the research of what is going on with the research of autophagy and intermittent fasting and made like a blog post. I will also put it basically in the chat for you to check out.

But yeah, I'll do it right away. We'll talk about some of the things in there. Because although it's been like another year since this update was released, I haven't changed my mind a lot about, I haven't made any additional updates to this update. But basically because there hasn't been that much new research and most of it has been something that has supported the main ideas of the book as well. So yeah, maybe some of the basics, what is autophagy? Autophagy itself is a pretty ubiquitous phenomena of the body. It's not like a thing. It's not something like a pack. It's the main image people use to describe autophagy. It's like a pack man that eats junk material, but it's not like that. It's more of a process that is governed by many cell particles and other processes. So it's not like a thing that you can find and identify. It's a very more complex than that. And it's also more involved with more things than just that. It's involved in the cell cleanup, but it's also involved in cell signaling and it does have some other aspects in terms of that. So it's a very intrinsic part of healthy cell functioning. And yeah, like the main kind of benefits that you get from autophagy tends to do with just a better health and longevity. So it has like a anti-aging effect in essence. But of course, there's also the kind of the poison makes those, it's not always good all the time. It's something that needs to be taken in the right amounts as well as in the right context. And it does have quite some negative side effects as well. But yeah, in the article I write that, yeah, in my opinion, like one of the best things to do for your longevity is to do both some aspects of this time machine leading as well as with resistance training because you're getting the best of both worlds when you're doing that. You're getting the kind of the catabolic benefits that you get from this, some individual fasting and autophagy, but you also get the anabolic benefits of like muscle growth and muscle building because muscle is very vital for longevity and like generally if you're very old, then it's hard for you to like maintain muscle mass and it's also, you see this very rapid decline in functional, in functionality the older you get because of this decreased muscle mass and this will increase like your risk of diabetes, it will increase the risk of insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease and also like increases the risk of hip fractures, osteoporosis, those sort of things. So doing some resistance training and building muscle is just like a good insurance against aging because you have better basically fitness. And yeah, but the two things, fasting and resistance training didn't to be like the opposites of each other. You can't really build muscle if you're fasting, at least like in the particular moment of the fast. In the particular moment of the fast, your body is breaking down and recycling itself. Whereas with the muscle growth happens when you're eating and nourishing yourself. So you have to find this balance between doing these things. And like just confining your eating window in some aspects is just a great way to achieve the benefit. And how long you should fast, depends a lot on your general like, yeah, like your goals, but also like your levels of physical activity. So the more physically active you are, the shorter you need to fast. Or you can't fast for that long if you're like very super active and you have a bunch of muscle mass because you're gonna just start to lose it eventually. And I think with one thing I did, maybe one of the kind of idea or the thoughts that I figured out was that you don't really need to fast for that long to get like the benefits of autophagy or that you need to go on this very super long fasts all the time to, you know, live longer or something. Because chances are you may actually or at least like for most people or people who aren't like very specialized, they're not like pros in interval fasting, they tend to overdo it or they didn't, they're not compensating for the things that happens during the fast. So, you know, while you're fasting your metabolic rate will drop eventually or at least like these longer fasts like three to five to fasts. At that time your metabolic rate will drop, your muscle mass will decline and your strength will decline in short term. And if you don't like compensate for it with adequate nutrition afterwards, then you may find yourself in a worse spot than you began with. So that's why like most people I think would benefit from more of like a regular consistent this time-restricted eating schedule of fasting for maybe like 16 or 18 hours every day and then you know every once in a while maybe having a slightly longer fast but it shouldn't be like the kind of a staple idea because that's one of the biggest misconceptions about autophagy that in order to get autophagy you need to fast for like three to five days in order for it to first begin. Well that's not really the case because you know autophagy can be turned on by many other things as well and stressors like exercise itself turns on autophagy and in fact like the exercise can turn on autophagy even faster than fasting because of the intensity of the physiological stress and and the exertion is much higher in a particular moment as you're exercising. So your body ramps up autophagy much more doing the exercise session itself but the only difference is that it kind of drops down after you stop the exercise because you're you know stopping the exertion so in order to increase or prolong the benefits then you can also implement this a little bit of time seeding and of course there's a lot other things as well that do it. Saunas, cold and you know coffee, polyphenols. So with coffee there's also like this mixed bag of feelings people have. There's die-hard coffee fans but there's also die-hard coffee haters which tribe you choose and yeah I think personally yeah I think the most of the research does show that the coffee is actually more beneficial than the potential negative side effects and you know the negative side effects don't happen to everyone not all the time and not in every situation. So yeah generally coffee is a good booster of autophagy and the benefits of the fast but yeah you don't you shouldn't let overdo it for sure. Well what did I figure out or what did I update one year after the initial launch of the book? Well I think one thing is pretty sure is that you know end of the fasting is a like a slightly more sustainable and effective way of increasing longevity than calorie restriction just calorie restriction because so far over the past few decades it has been kind of the gold standard idea that calorie restriction is the yeah one of the basically the only ways we know to extend lifespan but there are many studies that show that the end of the fasting mimics the effects of the calorie restriction in terms of the lifespan and longevity and you know even like the I had Mark Matson on my podcast a year ago and he is one of the kind of main researchers of this of end of fasting very renowned scientist and he said that actually the most of the most of the studies that do calorie restriction on these mice and rodents are actually also trimers eating studies because in order to achieve that calorie deficit they will you know eat less often they will feed the mice less.