#399 Avoid the Longevity Bottleneck That Kills Most People - Siim Land on the Ideal Day Podcast

Siim Land (0:00)

There aren't a lot of obese centenarians. Certainly, the muscle mass, I think, from an aging perspective, is more important than doing the cardio. But when you look at the studies, then the higher cardiovascular fitness is associated with a lower risk of mortality than muscle strength and muscle mass.

Adam Parker (0:17)

Siim Land, welcome back to the show.

Siim Land (0:21)

I'm happy to be here.

Adam Parker (0:24)

So we were just saying before we pressed record, it's been a while, and we've had you on a couple of times, but it's been a long time. It's great to have you back on, mate. And to jump into your new book, which I know you said you're just finishing up, and I'm guessing that will be released at some point this year, and that is the Longevity Leap. So I'm really excited about that.

So I'm curious, what got you interested in focusing on aging and longevity in the first place?

Siim Land (0:56)

Yeah, so I got into health as a thing when I was around 18, I think. So after high school, I was preparing to enroll in the military in Estonia. And during that summer, I started to focus a lot on my fitness, wanted to obviously prepare for the military, but also just get super fit. I wanted to win one of the titles in the military where you get the physical prepares test, the max scores on all the three tests. I didn't win it at that time. I got max scores in push-ups and sit-ups, but I didn't get the max score in the running test.

Funny enough, we had two years ago, we had the military reserve meeting.

We just like just every few years, they bring back the people to memorize things. And there, I did get the max scores. So I've gotten over 10 years, I've gotten fitter, which is good.

But yeah, I pretty much got interested in fitness and wanted to optimize it.

Did a lot of exercise and stuff like that, focused on a lot of the basics of nutrition. After the military, I went to the uni and started learning anthropology, which is something I was interested in because of being interested in humans as a species overall. I was interested in a lot of ancient civilizations and hunter-gatherers and those kinds of things.

And I just wanted to learn about humans. I didn't have a plan to become an anthropologist or an ethnographer, which most anthropologists would do. They would write ethnographies about different people, but I would do it as a way to just self-develop for myself and to learn about things. There I just also was advancing my knowledge in health and nutrition as well.

I continued exercising. I learned about different ways of dieting, eat a bit of fasting and those kinds of things. And at one point, I wanted to focus more on longevity because my grandfather died to colorectal cancer when he was 36 years old, which is super young. And I wasn't born then. My mother was eight years old or something. So it was obviously something that I didn't want to repeat in my family lineage. And the biggest or the most important part for any kind of chronic disease, whether that be heart disease, neurodegeneration, cancer and those kinds of things is prevention and living in a healthy lifestyle. Of course, there's some genetic aspects as well, but they can all be prevented with the proper lifestyle. So that's why I wanted to obviously take care of my own longevity. And I started to learn about those things as well, of how can I make sure that I don't die prematurely myself? Because I don't have good longevity genetics. No one in my family, I don't know of anyone who has lived over the age of 80 So they're all mostly dying in their 70s, which I'm hoping I can break at some point this curse. And another reason why I specifically wanted to create content about longevity and write books about it and really go into it was also because of the anthropological side. So obviously aging and longevity is something humans have been thinking about since our, you know, throughout our history, ever since we were hunter-gatherers, we've been thinking about death and living a long time and stuff like that. So it's just as an anthropologist, I'm also interested in the like philosophical and anthropological side of longevity, of figuring out one of the hardest problems humans have been thinking about throughout our history. And when we're talking about obesity or heart disease even, and other chronic diseases, then we pretty much know what needs to be done, and we have pretty reliable medicines as well to postpone those diseases. We know the lifestyle adjustments that need to be made.