#382 Top 5 Things For a Long Healthy Life, Top 3 Supplements Everyone Should Take - Q&A

Siim Land (0:00)

What are the top five things you can do for a healthy, long life? What is my current training routine like? And what are the macronutrients that I consume? This and a lot more in today's Q&A episode. If you want to ask me a question, then make sure you follow me on Instagram, where I do those Q&A's there regularly. It's showtime. All right, the first question is, top five things to do for long, healthy life.

Now, I do believe that it mostly comes down to the fundamentals. Like, there is very little evidence that any of these super fancy things, like fancy supplements or fancy exercise routines or fancy diets have any significant effects on lifespan and longevity. It mostly comes down to nailing down the fundamentals and making sure that you don't get a particular chronic disease early in life. Because the biggest thing that determines your maximum lifespan pretty much comes down to when are you getting these chronic diseases that most people die to? Like if you look at the top killers worldwide, then they're heart disease, stroke, and neurodegeneration, cancer, diabetes, and those kind of things in developed countries. In developing countries, there are obviously like these infectious diseases as well, but in developed countries, the Western world generally, it comes down to non-communicable diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and neurodegeneration. And when you look at the average age of heart disease, then it's pretty much around 65 years. The average age of a heart attack is 65 The average diagnosis of cancer is also around 65 to 70 And the average diagnosis of neurodegeneration and dementia is around 80 years of age. So most people, the reason why heart disease is the number one killer is because most people die to heart disease around their 60s and 70s. And that is kind of the biggest bottleneck in terms of determining your maximum lifespan. Like if you get heart disease in your 60s, then it's very unlikely that you will live to 100 years old, for example. Whereas if you get heart disease maybe a few decades later, like in your 80s or 90s, then the chance of you getting to 100 is still quite high. And this is what also you find in the centenarians. The centenarians are divided into like three main groups. There are these survivors. These people get a particular chronic disease, whether that be cancer, heart disease, or neurodegeneration, before the age of 80, and they still make it to the age of 100 Then there's the layers. Those people are the ones that don't get a chronic disease up until the age of 80 years old. So they make it to 80, and then after that, they get a chronic disease, and then they still make it to 100 And then there's escapers. These are the ones that don't get any of these chronic diseases up until the age of 100 So these are the kind of pure, most genetically best blessed or with the most healthiest lifestyle that avoid all these chronic diseases up until the age of 100

So the biggest rate-limiting step to how long you're going to live is heart disease. Primarily, like most people will die to heart disease, like one out of three or four people will die to heart disease. And this is the biggest bottleneck in your maximum lifespan. So for optimally living longer and healthier, it comes down to making sure that you don't get these chronic diseases. And this is a topic of my next book as well, which is called The Longevity Leap. And the idea behind that is that in order to live longer, you need to shorten the gap between health span or health adjusted life expectancy, which means the age or the duration of a life living disease free and your maximum lifespan. And in so doing, you would also be able to see an addition of a few extra years to your lifespan by doing that. So making sure that you avoid the chronic diseases comes down to prevention, preventing yourself from getting the chronic diseases. That is what is pretty much the most powerful way to ensure that you live longer. And obviously it's also the most powerful way to ensure that you live longer disease free, which improves the quality of those years. So the Longevity Leap is gonna just talk about, yeah, how do you bridge the gap between your health span and lifespan, and how do you delay and postpone these chronic diseases with the proper lifestyle habits and those kind of things. But chronic diseases, heart disease, neurodermatitis, cancer, diabetes, they are lifestyle diseases. Obviously there's genetics that contributes to that, but it's lifestyle and a lot of dietary practices, metabolic health, your fitness, all those things contribute to that. So taking a step back, what are like the top five things that you can do to live a healthy long life? It comes down to disease prevention and delaying those diseases. So what I would put the top five things into this list would be making sure that you're not overweight. It's probably like one of the top ones, because obesity being overweight, it increases the risk of all the chronic diseases. Like it increases the risk of diabetes, neurodegeneration, cancer, and heart disease quite a lot. And an obese person is expected to live around five to 20 years shorter because of the accumulation of these comorbidities and the development of these chronic diseases. Most people might not die to obesity per se, but they die to heart disease, but they get heart disease because of being obese, for example.