#316 My 2 KEY IDEAS for Longevity - Circadian NAD + Metabolic Autophagy Combo

Siim Land (0:00)

Hey, welcome back to the channel, my name is Siim Land, and today we talk about one of the most important aspects of my own personal longevity, and two key concepts and ideas that I think are very vital to your body's health span, longevity, and just overall vitality and energy. And it includes the Circadian NAD activation system, as well as my Metabolic Autophagy book. Make sure you click like and subscribe as well for future videos about Optimistic Health and Performance.

Alright, so let's begin with what is NAD? I'll cover some basics. You know, this presentation is going to be just talking about why I think these things are important and some of my key takeaways. So NAD, you know, this is a coenzyme in the body that without which you would die. And it regulates all energetic processes, all processes related to metabolism.

Yeah, genetics, epigenetics, DNA repair, antioxidant defense, genome stability, and excess performance, sleep cycles, wakefulness. Those things are dependent on NAD and NAD regulates these things. When you have low levels of NAD, then you start to see the accumulation of all these whole marks of aging, like DNA damage, loss of protostasis, mitochondrial dysfunction, cells in essence, stem cell exhaustion, epigenetic alterations, telomere attrition, altered cell communication, higher inflammation levels, you know, all those things that we do see as a whole mark of aging that cause aging or speed up the process of aging. Those things accumulate with the depletion of NAD that actually happens as a byproduct of aging itself.

The older you get to the end, the naturally you're going to have less NAD for different reasons. Like some of it has to do with, you know, just aging. Some of it also has to do with accumulation of damage and oxidative stress, et cetera. But regardless, you know, you start to get sick only in your like, most people don't get sick immediately when they're born in terms of metabolic diseases. They get these age-rated comorbidities around like the 40s or 50s, et cetera, 60s, when they become older and their bodies become, let's say, worn out. And this does correlate with the decrease in NAD levels as well. And vice versa, you can reverse those effects. Like you can reverse some of these metabolic comorbidities and, you know, inflammation and those things with administrating NAD boosters, precursors like NMN and Nicotinoid Riboside. There's human studies finding that it improves insulin sensitivity. It doesn't like, you know, reverse aging or it doesn't make you, you know, young in terms of that, but it does help you to reverse some of the damage that you've done to your health and can improve metabolic health, those kind of factors. At least that's what we know by now at the moment. We don't have like any data that it, you know, makes you live longer or something like that probably won't. But it does have like this healthspan promoting effect that it makes your metabolism a bit healthier and better functioning. So you do see benefits from having high levels of NAD and vice versa. Having low levels of NAD causes these comorbidities and age-rated diseases. So, you know, regardless, if it's even not going to make you live longer, you would still want to be healthier and have more energy and vitality whichever year or however old you are. So you would regardless want to have, for example, high levels of NAD.

How does the body produce NAD? This is where, like, many people miss the mark. So, you know, currently there's, you know, you need to take this NMN or nicotermid riboside to boost your energy, which does work. Like I said, there are studies showing that it works. You can also get it from food, from certain food precursors. But what is missed by everyone else, like no one else really talks about this, is that your body also, you know, recycles NAD.

Actually, the vast majority of NAD that you produce during day time does come from the salvage pathway. So, you know, 80%, 90% of the NAD that your body has is coming from recycling. So, yeah, precursors are great. But if you're not recycling the NAD properly, then you're always catching up. You're never going to, you're never going to like sustain it or you're always going to be dependent on this supplement or precursor. So that's why the key for, you know, sustainable anti-aging longevity vitality is to have a salvage pathway working properly and to recycle NAD all the time on a daily basis.

So how does these pathways work?

The salvage pathway, like I mentioned, this is where most of the NAD is coming from. So whenever you do produce NAD, some of the NAD is also going to get consumed and converted into nicotinamide, NAM. And these NAD consuming enzymes that consume NAD include like sirtuins, PARPs, which are DNA repair proteins, and CD38, which is like inflammatory glycoprotein that's converted into a nicotinamide. Then there is this key enzyme step or key rate limiting step in the salvage pathway, nicotinamide, phosphoribosyl transferase, NAPT, which is this bottleneck that is kind of, yeah, determines how much NAD is going to be recycled. And this is very important in terms of having the salvage pathway working properly. That can be converted into NMN and then into NAD. The food pathways that your body uses, food to NAD, is a price under pathway, it uses nicotinic acid, and the de novo biosynthesis pathway that uses tryptophan to convert into NAD. And yeah, obviously you do want to eat foods that have NAD precursors, like, you know, these are beneficial nutrients for other reasons as well. But the amount of NAD that you could get from these pathways is very small compared to the salvage pathway. Because even then, if you produce NAD through, let's say, the price under pathway, it's going to get converted to an NAD. And that NAD that you got from the diet will be eventually going into the salvage pathway anyway. So you want to have a salvage pathway working even properly, even if you're, you know, relying on foods or, let's say, the supplements. You take nicotinoid riboside, you can bi-step the bottleneck, you can bi-step the NAPT enzyme and still get some elevation in NAD levels, which we have seen in studies that these two supplements do raise NAD levels in humans.