#347 Top 5 Anti-Aging Supplements, How Much Gelatin and More - Q&A Siim Land

Siim Land (0:00)

Hey, welcome back to the channel, my name is Siim Land, and today we do another Instagram Q&A. If you want to ask me a question, then follow me on Instagram at Siimland, and I'll do those Q&As regularly there. Do it. All right, first question, start the day with carbs, yes or no? So I personally think that starting your day with a high carb breakfast is probably one of the worst things you can do for your metabolic health and metabolic flexibility. So the reason for that is, you know, you've just slept for, I don't know, seven to eight hours and you haven't moved around a lot. Your glycogen stores are generally full and you're already in some mild ketosis. So it doesn't really make sense to eat a bowl of cereal or something like that to kick you out of ketosis and to put you into a sugar burning mode pretty much for the rest of the day. So I always think that it's better to have the carbohydrates after your workout, whenever that is, or generally for dinner or something like that, because in the evening, having some glucose spike and insulin spike can be actually very good for increasing serotonin levels and making you sleepier, which improves your sleep quality. In the morning, you shouldn't need to have carbohydrates to have energy and feel energized. If you have good metabolic flexibility, then you're already in some mild ketosis. While sleeping, waking up in the morning would keep you in that metabolic state of burning some more fat and improving your insulin sensitivity. But eating some very high amounts of carbs would just kick you out of ketosis and neglect some of the other beneficial metabolic processes that happen. Your autophagy actually also starts to rise when you wake up in the morning alongside with the ketosis. So if you just eat a lot of carbs, you're just putting breaks to all these beneficial metabolic processes that occur in that semi-fast state. And if you do eat a lower carb breakfast, then you can maintain it for longer. If you don't spike your insulin and blood sugar immediately, then you will stay in ketosis, and you will also maintain this activation of these other longevity pathways for a bit longer. So overall, carbs for breakfast, not so much unless you worked out immediately before. Then it's kind of okay. Overall, I would say that the carbs for dinner are better or for like later after you worked out. And the best breakfast without having worked out is gonna be something like some ketotic, maybe like some protein, fiber, and lower carb intake. If you want to truly know the state of your health and disease risk, then check out Insight Tracker. Insight Tracker is an at-home biomarker service that you can use to test up to 43 different biomarkers like lipids, liver enzymes, inflammation, sex hormones, and much more. The process is simple. You order the test kit to your home, use the little finger prick device to give your blood, send it back, and you get results to your online dashboard or app. You can get a 25% discount of all their tests if you head over to siimland.com forward slash Insight Tracker, that's in one word. And you can use the code siimland at checkout. That's siimland.com forward slash Insight Tracker, and the code is siimland.

Next question, just bought beef gelatin. What daily intake would you recommend? So beef gelatin has a very similar amino acid profile than these collagen peptide supplements. The collagen peptide supplements have a little bit more glycine and some other amino acids, so they're more optimal for the collagen synthesis side. But getting some of gelatin into your diet does increase your collagen precursor intake that has a positive effect on your overall daily collagen turnover. How much you should aim for? I think 10 grams a day is still a minimum to aim for, and maybe 10 to 20 grams is the safe and recommended range, in my opinion. Is exercise always needed to utilize collagen for joints and skin?

So no, you don't need to exercise to stimulate collagen synthesis, although exercise does directly stimulate collagen synthesis in the joints that are being trained. So if you take collagen peptides or gelatin and vitamin C, like an hour or two before exercise, then we do see in studies that the collagen synthesis is greater than not doing that. And exercise alone can also improve collagen synthesis, but you obviously also need the collagen precursors. So that's why taking some collagen, whether that be from actual food or the supplements, is going to have the best effect in terms of the final collagen outcome. For the skin, you don't need to necessarily exercise to improve collagen synthesis in the skin. For that, you just need to have the adequate amounts of collagen precursors and the other amino acids on a daily basis to support skin turnover and collagen turnover in the skin. And yeah, you don't need to necessarily exercise for that, although maybe just directly more blood flow to the skin in some way can maybe improve that outcome. But I would say that you don't need to exercise for either of them generally. But the joint synthesis of collagen is better if you exercise after taking the collagen. Next question, what are your tips against fear of third world war? So that's an interesting question and quite relevant at the moment, obviously. Well, I think from a Stoic philosophy side, you can't really control many of the outside events. You probably can't control your politicians to the extent of preventing them from going to nuclear war, if it ever were to come to that place. So you can't really control it. You can control only what is in your control. And those things include just being prepared for it in whatever way you can do, like, of course, many people, they don't even want to prepare for it. They would much rather get it over with as fast as possible and just die without having to deal with it. After the fact, I think I'm not gonna give any information or recommendations about that. So I'm gonna just maybe talk about how you can deal with the fear itself. So first of all, like I said, you can't control it. So it's out of your control. If it were to ever happen, then it happened because you didn't, you couldn't have done anything about it anyway. So there's no rationale behind being afraid of it. And second of all, if it were to happen, then I mean, if you're gonna die, then I don't think there's, I think death isn't that scary. Like, I don't think any, none of us remembered what it was like before our birth. So we probably won't remember what it's gonna be like after we die either. So it's just very irrational to worry about something that we don't know anything about and what we're not gonna remember at all. So in that sense, yeah, I think those are pretty much the only practical, or not practical, but mental tips I can give in terms of that. You can't control it. If it's gonna happen, then it's probably gonna be irrelevant in terms of your subjective experience. Unless you believe in some afterlife or something else like that, that's probably a different story, and you have to try to live according to that of that kind of religious system that you may have, whichever it is.