#73 Balancing Autophagy and mTOR - Biohacker Summit Tallinn 2018

Ivor Cummins (0:01)

Our next speaker is amazing, amazing Siim Land. He is one of the pioneers really, when it comes to understanding the real health effects of ketogenic diets.

Siim Land (0:29)

So yeah, thanks, Ivor, again, for this amazing speech. And one point I want to bring out is that one of the biggest tragedies in life is not knowing if you are diseased, or even if you are diseased, not knowing what to do about it. So the purpose of my speech would be to kind of bring some real-time interventions or lifestyle practices that you can implement into your life and kind of gain this insight of how can I see my body going, in what directions am I heading towards with my health, and what are the trends.

So, yeah. So the topic of my speech is going to be balancing the anabolic and catabolic cycles of life. So this is going to be this sort of a metaphorical title to it as well. So let's start from what is life itself. This is life basically.

It's a collection of, you know, genetics, DNA, sequences, chromosomes, mitochondria, everything, bacteria that is ultimately going to create you as a superorganism. And when you dissect the life into two parts, then at first you're going to get, where life sprouts into existence, is going to be DNA replication, cellular growth, and that's going to be, the term for that is going to be called the anabolism, where you're growing. And the opposite to that is entropy, or life itself, the process of living and dying, and that's going to be catabolism. Those two are these balancing counterparts of life.

And when you look at it from a metabolic perspective, then these two are always interacting, and they're balancing each other, but depending on the input and output of your system. So at the top, we have fuel, which would be everything that is going to allow you to live, like oxygen, energy, food, calories, everything they included, and that's going to go into your metabolic furnace, so to say. And in that, it's going to be cycled into, it's going to be broken down into energy through the process of catabolism and through the process of anabolism, you're going to build that energy into whether muscle tissue, bones, bones, fat tissue, and brain cells, and everything. So a good picture to think about it is that when you're born, you're being anabolic, you're being born into this world, and when you die, you're going to eventually lead to the point of ultimate catabolism, where you're being recycled back. And the same principle can be found in the example of building tissue, like muscle tissue and everything, that's anabolic. And creating energy itself is catabolic as well. You're literally breaking down energy molecules so that you can recycle them back into like literally building this tissue and starting to live.

So you can see this trend in your everyday life as well as a human being. When you're born, then you're being very anabolic, so to say. You're producing a lot of growth hormone, and that's going to help you to build this new tissue and build new bone structures and everything included. And as you age, all of these anabolic hormones, they begin to drop just because of the process of entropy, like growth hormone decreases as you age. And usually after 20 and after 30, that's when your growth hormone is really going to begin to plummet and you're beginning to enter the catabolic cycles of life. And the same trends can be found in like overall muscle mass and overall strength as well. Like early life, you're growing, developing. During your adulthood, you're kind of maintaining it. And in your older life, the general trend is that you begin to lose a lot of your muscle mass and everything included. You're waning down yourself.

And one of the biggest reasons why we age are connected to these anabolic and catabolic cycles. So a huge cause of aging itself is this term called sarcopenia, which translates into muscle loss. And as you saw in the previous slides, growth hormone declines, and that's going to basically lead to sarcopenia. That's one of the causes of why you kind of go into this catabolic mode, because you're not producing that much growth hormone, you're not producing that much testosterone, and you don't have enough of the anabolic hormones to sustain your lean muscle. But sustaining your lean muscle is incredibly vital for your general longevity and lifespan, not because of just only having the youthfulness, but at the same time, it acts like a huge metabolic organ as well, muscle tissue. It makes you more insulin sensitive, which will then protect against heart disease. It's going to help you to have some cognitive performance as well, and of course maintains joint integrity and everything. And a lot of people, why people die is, or why old people die is like they fall off stairs, they broke their hip, and they're going to simply, they don't have the resilience and robustness.