#505 Siim Land: How I Ranked #1 in the Longevity World Cup and Lowered Biological Age by 21.1 Years

Mikk Väino (0:00)

Siim Land, you just joined the Longevity World Cup and took the first place right away with a 21-year age reduction on the Boards Clock and a 19-years age reduction on the Fino Age Clock. Your biomarkers put Brian Jones on to shame.

Siim, how does it feel to be the healthiest man alive?

Siim Land (0:25)

Well, I think, you know, that statement itself is hard to prove. I guess you could say that I'm number one on this particular Longevity World Cup. But yeah, I'm sure there's some people with equally as good or even better biomarkers, which we can discuss about my particular test results and how good they are and what do they mean. But yeah, I guess I would say that this particular test result that I did was very good in my opinion as well. So I saw some improvements in some biomarkers that I have been trying to improve over the last few months. So yeah, I'm happy with that particular test result.

And yeah, I think those biomarkers were, I would consider them pretty optimal. So nothing we did to improve myself currently.

Mikk Väino (1:29)

So I want to ask you about how did you achieve it, but just a bit of philosophical question here, because of course, the competition is just about how would you prove, right? Prove that someone's biomarkers are better than someone else's?

Siim Land (1:48)

Yeah, so there is no, in my opinion, no single test you could use. You can't just use one test, because one test, it might not look at your systemic health or your multi-organ system function. It might look at some individual function of your organs or your epigenetics or something like that. But for, when I'm talking about longevity, then it mostly comes down to having as many of your organ systems and bodily systems working optimally and having a very low risk of disease and disorder. So any test isn't causally going to prove how long you're going to live. There's a lot of unpredictable nature to this. And someone with perfect biomarkers, they might not have that beneficial genetics for maximal lifespan and vice versa. Someone with poor biomarkers, but with excellent longevity genetics, they might live a long time.

So, yeah, with longevity, it can't be just a single set of biomarkers, and especially not one single biomarker. The best we can do to predict someone's future longevity is to predict their future risk of mortality and other chronic diseases that might kill them. So I like to look at multiple systems in addition to just blood markers, like your kidney markers, liver markers, metabolic health markers, inflammation markers, immune markers, et cetera. In addition to that, it's also important to look at things like functional outcomes. So, because one of the biggest characteristics of aging is the loss of physical function. So not being able to lift stuff, not being able to run, not being able to get off the floor, not being able to maintain balance, not being able to sprint, jump, all those things decline quite significantly with age.

So, being able to also have very good fitness and physical function, physical biomarkers, things like via to max or grip strength, and how many pull-ups you can do, how fast you can sprint 100 meters, all of things matter in a sense. Of course, someone could have excellent physical fitness markers, and they could also at the same time have poor blood markers. So someone who is very strong, but they could have high inflammation, or high triglycerides, or something else like that, which indicates poor metabolic health, or poor insensitivity. And that's not the most optimal scenario. So the best case is that you have at least above average fitness markers, and above average blood markers. So rather than having something that is super good, and the other thing is super bad, it's better to have everything decent, and everything above average. You don't want to go in one direction only, you want to spread out evenly, and you can think of it your health as well. You want to improve your health markers, and your health status evenly across the spectrum. So rather than just having perfect fitness, but poor mental health, you want to have at least decent fitness, and at least decent mental health, as opposed to the opposite.

Mikk Väino (5:09)

Ultimately, it would be pretty nice if we would come to a single metric, a single number out of all these. So just, okay, here is something interesting. What is a biological aging clock? Biological aging clock is a user experience record on top of mortality predictions. So what does this mean? It's like, okay, what's the hardest outcome when you're considering health as a whole?