#262 The 5 Longevity Breakthroughs That Will Help You Reverse Age - Dr Melissa Petersen

Melissa Petersen (0:00)

What this study showed is that if we can slow down and or reverse the biological aging process by just one year, we already bring back into the economy $38 trillion.

Siim Land (0:16)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Melissa Petersen. Dr. Melissa is an Epigenetic Success Coach and a licensed chiropractic with a board certification in Holistic Health.

I was also speaking at Dr. Melissa's free online event, the Longevity Summit, with other experts from the anti-aging field. Check out the free Longevity Summit at siimland.com forward slash 262 That's siimland.com forward slash 262 Melissa, welcome back to the show.

Melissa Petersen (0:44)

Thanks so much, Siim. It's great to be here.

Siim Land (0:46)

Yeah, like we had our first podcast maybe like a year ago as well, and we were just talking about your Longevity Summit where you were just having these experts on from this longevity field, anti-aging field, and you're doing it again this year. So like what's new this time? Like is the summit itself like principles are the same or is there something like new that you're gonna be covering?

Melissa Petersen (1:09)

Yeah, thanks. That's a great question. Longevity is an ongoing conversation. So it's definitely not a one and done. The advancements are occurring so rapidly.

And it's interesting, I didn't know if I was gonna do a season two, but season one was so widely just accepted and celebrated. And we got great feedback from it.

And what I realized quite quickly was like, I have all this great content. And so maybe I'll just do a reboot and I'll just grab a few new interviews. And I was like, there's so much that has happened this past year. And there's just, there is such a deeper dive. And I don't think that people understand this precipice that we're at because we've all globally been consumed with a pandemic and a conversation that seems very restrictive and constricting around fear. And there's so much possibility. There's so much advancement. There is so much that is in the here, near and kind of far horizon now into the next 25 years. The way we understand our health and human flourishing is going to express radically in new and different ways. And so I had to do season two.

And of course we had you back. And so I'm excited that we're here to kind of dive into some of the big concepts and breakthroughs.

Siim Land (2:28)

Yeah, I'm also excited to be back. And yeah, it's definitely something that hasn't slowed down due to the pandemic, the longevity research and actually pretty big new breakthroughs have been also made this past year or at least like a paradigm shifts in terms of the public's viewpoint on aging and longevity.

So maybe we'll just like explain people to again, briefly, like what do you mean by longevity and extended lifespan and aging itself? Like what does it mean to you specifically?

Melissa Petersen (3:00)

Yeah, thank you. Longevity actually to me probably means something, to me it means a legacy conversation.

I think to many longevity is this idea of life extension and it gets relegated to an age demographic 55 and older or 65 and older depending on who you're speaking to.

And yet that's not it at all. Longevity is actually a lifespan and legacy conversation because what begins to inform the quality of our health and how it will express throughout our lives actually begins 120 days before we're ever conceived. So there's a whole pocket of longevity that's in preconception specifically in the male from an epigenetic standpoint. And we spoke a little bit about epigenetics last time just in some of the methylation markers. So kind of the environment is always informing our biology and notes are constantly being taken. And so then this idea of longevity, it's always again been about lifespan, but now more than ever, it is also about healthspan and something I talk about in the codes of longevity, which is well-span.

And what I mean specifically by this steam is that we can look around the world and there's really clear facts. Lifespan has continued to increase pretty much year over year for the past 100 years, 65% increase in how long we are living. And then we can say, well, okay, hey, we're just living through a pandemic and most of the world is sick and there's people dying and we can see clearly that especially in the US, 45% of our population is diagnosed with a chronic disease. And that starts, we really see it exponentially increase every decade after 30, but it really gets in intense by time we hit that 60th, like once we hit that 60 marker, that starts to increase. So on the one hand, longevity has always been lifespan, living longer. We're living longer, but not necessarily better.