#432 Top Foods and Supplements for Brain Health, Top 10 Health Items, and More - Q&A

Siim Land (0:00)

All right, first question. Best foods and supplements for brain health? The first one would be omega-3s, both from the dietary source as well as the supplemental form. So from a dietary source, fish, seafood is associated with lower rates of, you know, heart disease, but also Alzheimer's. So the same, you know, with supplements, there isn't less of an association between supplement use of omega-3s and lower rates of Alzheimer's or dementia, but it certainly is for cardiovascular diseases. With Alzheimer's specifically, there's the association between a higher omega-3 index and lower rates of Alzheimer's and dementia and all-cause mortality. So I think that's a very great way to assess whether or not omega-3s are working for you, have an actual blood marker that you can measure and see, okay, is there enough omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA in my red blood cells? So that's why I like omega-3s and the omega-3 index as a blood test to do if it's working. The second supplement would be creatine. So creatine used to be thought of as a sports supplement exclusively, but there's a lot of new studies showing that creatine is also great for memory, especially in elderly people, and it might have some neuroprotective effects as well. There's no studies, you know, clinical trials with creatine on Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, et cetera. But creatine is undoubtedly beneficial for the brain. Your brain uses a lot of creatine and, you know, creatine is kind of very beneficial for energy production overall. And one interesting and underrated way creatine has benefits on the brain is by reducing your sleep demand. So because of the way creatine is utilized by the brain for energy, then having higher creatine stores in the brain would reduce also your sleep demand and lowers the sleep pressure. So you're feeling less tired even if you sleep slightly shorter periods of time. So whenever I'm, let's say, traveling or if I'm missing a few nights of sleep or a few hours of sleep, then I usually kind of mega dose creatine on those days. And even before getting the sleep deprivation, it's good to build up to higher creatine levels in the brain by taking slightly higher doses every day. So like 5 to 10 grams every day. And yeah, the much higher doses appear to be even better than the lower doses. So up to 100 milligrams per kilogram. So for me, that will be 8 grams per day. Someone heavier, it will be even more. So usually in a lot of the studies, they use much higher doses than people typically recommend, which will be like 3 grams per day. I think 3 grams is great, but it's not the optimal based on the clinical trials where they find even up to 8 to 10 grams is beneficial. And even some cases with the sleep deprivation studies, they find even like 20 grams. Taking 20 grams of creatine for several days before sleep deprivation has very great effects in reducing the performance drop-off from sleep deprivation. So you can take creatine as a supplement, you can get it also from foods, although it's pretty hard to get 8 to 10 grams of creatine from just foods. To get 5 grams of creatine, you would need to eat approximately 500 grams of herring or like a kilogram of red meat. So some people definitely are able to pull it off. It's just you also end up consuming quite a lot of calories in the process unless you're eating herring. So 400 grams, 500 grams of herring, you get 5 grams of creatine. And to get the 10 grams, you would need to double that. And the same applies to meat. To get the 10 grams of creatine from just meat, you would need to eat 2 kilograms of meat. So yeah, to eat his own, I would much rather take some of the, let's say goal, I would get some of that goal with a supplemental creatine because it's very cheap, very studied. It's the most studied supplement in history probably. It has the most amount of studies out there. So yeah, that's how you pretty much get creatine. The next food would be egg yolks. So egg yolks are also packed with a lot of different micronutrients that your brain needs. But specifically, it's very high in these carotenoids, like lutein and zeaxanthin, and also choline that's essential for the myelination of the neurons. So egg yolks are very beneficial for the brain in terms of the micronutrients. And I wouldn't supplement choline itself. Like there are some potential, let's say downside to supplemental choline, in my opinion, specifically related to a kidney function through increasing TMAO. So I would much rather get the choline from the dietary sources such as egg yolks, or a liver are also pretty high, is also like very high in a choline. So yeah, that's how you would get the choline, in my opinion, like 420 milligrams per day is the kind of recommended amount, which you can get from three to four egg yolks typically. But you can also supplement some of these carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin. So you can get lutein and zeaxanthin also from these orange vegetables and orange fruits, like pumpkin, squash, cantaloupe, this persimmon, different kinds of orange types of vegetables, carrots, sweet potatoes, etc. And the last carotenoid that you can also supplement, plus you can get it from food, is astaxanthin. So good for the eyes. The same with the carotenoids, the lutein and zeaxanthin. Very good for the eyes. It's been seen that a higher carotenoid intake from dietary resources is associated with lower rates of macular degeneration and neurodegeneration as well. So yeah, I'm a big believer in carotenoids. So I'm getting quite a lot of dietary carotenoids in myself. Plus, I take zeaxanthin for the other benefits, for the skin benefits, for senescent benefits as well. So zeaxanthin has also benefits on removing senescent cells. So 12 grams of zeaxanthin is what I'm taking every day. But you can get it also from fish, specifically like pink kind of foods, pink fish like salmon. The last supplement, I would say, is a bonus. There's not like a ton of research done on yet, but magnesium L3N8 is the specific type of magnesium that's the most bioavailable to the brain. So I haven't seen like a ton of, like, let's say convincing evidence on magnesium L3N8 yet, but it's in the pipeline. And I would imagine that eventually we'll, over the next few years, we will probably have quite interesting studies about magnesium L3N8 and brain health as well. Next question. What's the best and worst longevity advice you got in your life? I think the best advice, I wouldn't say I got it from someone, but just through my own research of the field and reading a ton of books, reading a ton of studies, thinking about the entire idea itself, I would say the best advice out there would be to track your blood work, at least on a semi-regular basis. You don't need to track your blood work every month. Even like twice a year is probably more than enough for most people. I'd say like once a year, having like measuring at least some of the more conventional blood markers, such as your lipids, your inflammation markers, white blood cells, electrolytes, liver markers, kidney markers, and glucose markers, etc., sex hormones, just a very rudimentary blood analysis would give you a lot of insight into your health because we live our lives, we feel either good or bad depending on our health status, depending on our micronutrient status, depending on our sleep, depending on the season, depending on how much light we're getting, etc. But the only way to actually know if you're healthy or not is to look inside, what's inside your body. And blood work is, I wouldn't say it's like, it's not like perfect, obviously, there's a lot of nuances to blood work, there's a lot of, if more like complexities to it as well, kind of depends a lot on the context, depends a lot on the individual, but generally we have a pretty good understanding of what's optimal for different blood markers and what's out of the range, what is heading towards a particular chronic disease. So one great example is that, you know, you're not going to get diabetes overnight. Diabetes is a disease that you develop over the course of many years and decades. So your blood sugar isn't going to just, you know, one day you're going to wake up and it's immediately in the diabetic range. Like it's normal, normal below 100 milligrams, below 100 milligrams, and then boom, 130 milligrams, you're diabetic. It doesn't really work like that. It's more generally that on your first, your pre-diabetic, you stay there for a little while, and then eventually you'll develop full blown diabetes or get diagnosed with it. So whenever you're seeing that you're heading in the wrong direction with your blood markers, you're seeing that your testosterone is chronically low, or your kidney markers are declining slowly, slowly, then you can reverse the course. You can change something about your lifestyle or supplements or diet or exercise, whatever it is. Maybe you need to lose weight, and then it fixes the blood sugar problem immediately. Whatever the issue is, you can see it getting worse, and then you can make preemptive action to change it. That's the power of tracking things regularly. And if you just rely on your intuition and rely on, you know, like what other people might tell you, then you might be heading in the wrong, or at least you wouldn't want to take the risk. I guess that's the point. You know, it's always better to be on the safe side rather than following experimental diets, experimental procedures. It's better to be on the safe side because you only have one life. You know, you only have one kidney, technically speaking, because if you give away one of your kidneys or if you lose one of your kidneys, then you only have one left. So you technically still have only one kidney. And you know, the same applies to every other thing in your body. You don't want to take any chances, I guess. You know, as long as your goal is to, you know, live as long as possible and be as healthy as possible. So you don't really want to take chances. And tracking your blood work is just the most effective way to assess your internal health. Of course, you need to look at it in the whole picture. If your mental health sucks because of or despite having perfect blood markers, your mental health is bad. Or if your physical fitness is bad, you have perfect blood markers. But you are with very low muscle strength or you have very low bone density, then of course, those things matter as well, the bone density and the muscle strength or the mental health, etc. So it's not just like in isolation, but it's still one of the best ways to assess your internal health.