#487 The Future of Longevity: What Comes After Diet & Exercise - Panel Discussion at Copenhagen Health Week 2025

Siim Land (0:01)

Gentlemen, good to see you both. So first question to you, Jürgen, I'm gonna start with you. Why does longevity matter to you? And why should it matter to our audience?

Jürgen Mehrtens (0:15)

Yeah, sure. So I believe longevity, for me at least, is not about living forever, but to maximize my healthy lifespan in order to be able to see my grandchildren grow up, eventually play with them, you know, do sports with them, play football with them. And I think that reason should apply to everyone here. I believe nowadays it's quite easy to achieve that. There are a lot of low-hanging foods out there. Everyone could work on, so to say. You just have to sleep well. You just get a healthy diet and work out. And yeah, that's a huge leverage we have right now. And I would tell everyone to start with that and see how quickly your body actually develops.

Siim Land (1:14)

Brilliant. And you, Siim, what does longevity mean to you?

Julian Assa (1:17)

Yeah, I got interested in longevity as a preventive health tool because my grandfather died to colon cancer when he was 36 years old, way before I was born even. So I didn't want to get some sort of a chronic disease early in life myself either. So I wanted to go beyond just fitness, which I was into before that, and I wanted to take a more preventive health approach. I also studied anthropology at the time, and anthropology is a field that is covering many aspects, human culture, archaeology, evolution, pretty much everything about humans and all different types of humanitarian fields. And as an anthropologist, I was interested in, I guess, the future of the human species. Obviously, the past is interesting, but the future can be even more exciting. And longevity is something that is just a very scientifically hard problem to solve. So obviously, weight loss and diabetes, et cetera, they're relatively simple diseases in the sense that we know what causes them, we know how to reverse them. Obviously, the practical application isn't always easy, but life extension, reversing aging, making people live decades longer is a very hard problem to solve. So I wanted to dig deep into that as well as a scientific problem of, okay, how do you actually fix it? How do you achieve it? And also, what are the other ethical implications and societal implications that follow if we ever were to, quote unquote, fix aging or make people live decades longer?

Siim Land (3:10)

I just want to ask a question to the audience. Who here is here because of something that happened to their health or the health of a loved one?

Okay, interesting, very interesting. I really want to ask a question that goes into, we all think about living long as, you know, the diet, the exercise, this and that, but actually preventing early onset is also an important thing. Jürgen, given that you're working and you've got your clinic, how far is technology going now to better detect early onset of, let's say, cancer?

Jürgen Mehrtens (3:49)

Yeah, so technology is advancing quite quickly.

At least in our clinic, we are already using AI to detect skin cancer, for example. We even have a retina scan that can detect heart risks and so on and so forth. But the real problem I see is that it's still very fragmented, and we haven't quite yet gotten into a phase where it's being introduced all together. And as soon as we are capable of doing that, we will see major breakthroughs.

Siim Land (4:31)

Siim, I notice you're not wearing any wearables. You've got a gold ring. As someone who is one of the leading biohackers in Europe, how do you measure yourself?

Julian Assa (4:43)

Measure.

Siim Land (4:43)

Measure, just measure. And also, do you go to a clinic? Do you get measured?

Do you do early onset MRI scans or anything like that?

Julian Assa (4:52)

Yeah, I do comprehensive health tracking for myself. I track the blood work. I track my bone density via TMAX. I take MRI, you know, not very frequently, but occasionally. So I do comprehensive health tracking for myself, for the major risk factors and the major chronic diseases.

I don't do a lot of a daily tracking, so I don't track my sleep regularly. I don't track my blood sugar, you know, regularly. It's because I think, or at least I just find it not necessary. It's mostly like a convenience thing. So, you know, you have to charge the ring. You sometimes forget to charge the ring, and then it just collects zero data, et cetera. So I don't find it useful for me to track it all the time because my regular routine or lifestyle hasn't changed that much. So I'm not expecting any big fluctuations in my sleep quality or sleep duration or HRV or things like that. You know, I did have like an eat sleep mattress before, and this one just tracked it all the time. You don't have to charge it, so it's always on. So that one, you know, I could have found more useful because I didn't have to charge it. But the ring is, I just forget to charge it sometimes.