Biological age is a critically under-examined health marker for assessing your overall health and longevity.
What gets measured gets improved, and it is mission-critical to track and optimize your biological age.
After all, living longer is pointless if you are spending every waking second with chronic diseases that are ruining your quality of life.
In this blog post, you’re going to learn that your health has NOTHING to do with how old you are.
More importantly, you’ll learn why biological age is important and how you can start tracking it today.
What Is the Difference Between Chronological Age And Biological Age?
To understand the significance of biological age, it is important to understand how it is separate from your chronological age.
Your chronological age is simply how old you are — nothing more, nothing less.
And although you can be in great shape or health at any age, aging is generally considered to be a major health problem:
“Aging is a complicated process characterized by progressive decline in physical, mental, and reproductive capacities, leading to a loss of function, increased susceptibility to disease, and ultimately the end of life”
Which is why the field of anti-aging medicine has become so popular in recent years.
“Many natural aging mechanisms frequently result in actual diseases. From this we can conclude that fighting an aging process may well bring about an improvement of an age related illness.”
…[Anti-aging medicine] treats the underlying causes of aging and aims at alleviating any age related ailment. Its goal is to extend the healthy lifespan of humans having youthful characteristics.”
This quote hits it right on the nail: We want to live LONGER, but we also want to be HEALTHIER in the extra years we add to our lifespans.
For this reason, your chronological age is a poor indicator of aging:
“…life expectancy shows considerable variation among individuals with equal or similar CAs due to diversity in genotypes and in living habits and environments.
A 50-year-old individual may have 60-year-old body functions, and many people look older or younger compared to others at the same CA (even in twins).Therefore, CA is not an optimal indicator for the aging progress.”
Your biological age, on the other hand, dictates the speed at which you are aging:
“Biological age combines specific physiological measures to determine a person’s status of health relative to individuals of a certain chronological age.
…Biological age therefore looks at the pace at which we’re aging, and ultimately determines our current levels of health while helping to predict our lifespan.”
Biological age refers to the progressive loss of function, which is independent of time.
Researchers have discovered that we are at our healthiest when our biological age is far lower than our chronological age:
(Source)
Likewise, we are at our unhealthiest when our biological age is far greater than our chronological age.
Why Is Biological Age So Important?
Your biological age — in relation to your chronological — is heavily correlated with your likelihood of contracting multiple diseases:
“Among the top 43 most common health conditions and behaviors in our cohort, after correcting for multiple comparisons, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, lung infection, type 2 diabetes (T2D), and breast cancer were associated with increased ΔAge in models adjusted for [chronological age] and obesity”
Take a look at the picture below, which comes from the study I just quoted:
“ΔAge” in this picture is defined as “chronological age subtracted by biological age”
(A positive ΔAge means your biological age is older than your chronological age, while a negative ΔAge means your biological age is younger than your chronological age)
In all 43 disease states, having an older biological age is bad news.
But the good news is that we are perfectly capable of reversing our body’s biological age:
“A small clinical study in California has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body’s epigenetic clock, which measures a person’s biological age.
For one year, nine healthy volunteers took a cocktail of three common drugs — growth hormone and two diabetes medications — and on average shed 2.5 years of their biological ages, measured by analysing marks on a person’s genomes. The participants’ immune systems also showed signs of rejuvenation.”
Yet you don’t need drugs to make this happen.
You can easily reverse your biological age by changing your lifestyle habits and becoming fully optimized.
Things such as maintaining a healthy body fat percentage, eating a clean diet, getting regular exercise, managing stress, avoiding environmental toxins, and sleeping 7-8 hours per night can do wonders for lowering your biological age.
The conclusion is simple: Lower your biological age as much as possible and you will achieve a state of optimal health.
To use an analogy, imagine biological age as the final grade you get after taking a class.
Measuring other health metrics such as your inflammatory markers would be equivalent to the marks you get on tests and assignments that add up towards your final grade.
What Is The Best Way To Measure Biological Age?
How do we go about measuring our biological age in the most accurate and efficient way possible?
This mystery has been pursued by scientists for decades, examining different biomarkers that do the best possible job of expressing our biological age in numerical terms.
According to the American Federation for Aging Research, a biomarker for biological aging must meet four specific criteria:
“1. It must predict the rate of aging. In other words, it would tell exactly where a person is in their total life span. It must be a better predictor of life span than chronological age.
2. It must monitor a basic process that underlies the aging process, not the effects of disease.
3. It must be able to be tested repeatedly without harming the person. For example, a blood test or an imaging technique
4. It must be something that works in humans and in laboratory animals, such as mice. This is so that it can be tested in lab animals before being validated in humans.”
To date, the best predictor of biological age is your “epigenetic clock”:
“…the epigenetic clock appears to be associated with a wide spectrum of aging outcomes, most consistently mortality. Its predictability is observable in several different tissues, suggesting a pervasive, systems-level mechanism.”
On top of measuring the rate at which you are aging, your epigenetic clock can make a clear distinction between your chronological age and your biological age.
There are separate epigenetic clocks that can track processes such as cellular senescence.
And for those you wondering what in the world an epigenetic clock is, here’s a good definition:
“…an estimator built from epigenetic DNA methylation marks that are strongly correlated with chronological age or time, which can accurately quantify an age-related phenotype or outcome, or both”
(FYI: Epigenetics refers to the study of biological processes that regulate gene expression by turning certain genes “on” and “off”)
But how is the biological process of DNA methylation connected to your biological age?
Well, it turns out that DNA methylation is largely responsible for influencing gene expression:
“DNA methylation occurs naturally when a methyl group – a chemical structure containing three carbon atoms and one hydrogen atom – attaches to one of DNA’s four nucleotide bases (adenine [A], cytosine [C], guanine [G], or thymine [T]).
The most common DNA methylation process involves the addition of a methyl group to one of the carbon atoms in the cytosine base, forming 5-methylcytosine…The majority of 5-methylcytosine is found on areas of the DNA known as CpG islands – short stretches of DNA where the frequency of the cytosine-guanine (CG) sequence is higher than other regions”
Let me tell you the implications of all that complicated science…
DNA methylation is a double-edged sword.
While it is essential to selectively turn certain genes on and off for your development in the womb and beyond, DNA methylation can also lead to several disease states.
For example, a lack of methylation (a.k.a. hypomethylation, or DNA demethylation) is commonly observed in the DNA sequences of cancer cells.
Fortunately, DNA methylation can be affected positively or negatively by our dietary and lifestyle choices.
Which leads us to asking several critical questions…
Is there any DNA methylation test in existence that can tell us EXACTLY where an excess or lack of DNA methylation is taking place in our genome?
And can this same test provide us with actionable information to determine the changes we need to start making in our lives?
The ONLY Biological Age Test You Should Be Using
If you’re looking for a truly advanced epigenetic DNA methylation test for tracking your biological age with unrivaled precision and accuracy, I would highly recommend checking out TruDiagnostic.
Taken directly from their website:
“TruDiagnostic™ is a state-of-the-art epigenetics diagnostic company that offers diagnostics for clinical practitioners and their patients hoping to read their DNA methylation patterns to help diagnose and affect health outcomes.”
Since they use the most advanced deep-learning algorithms powered by artificial intelligence, you are getting your hands on a test which is far more comprehensive than anything in the market.
Whereas most tests will use 2,000 spots on the human genome or less, TruDiagnostic uses 850,000 spots — 425 times MORE than any leading competitor!
They also use blood samples, which are the best way to precisely track DNA methylation levels and provide you with better data.
But all of those things pale in comparison to the most important part of their TruAge diagnostic kit.
TruAge tells you how long you can expect to live, along with your likelihood of contracting certain diseases.
The information you get from your test puts you in a position of power to take preventative action before your health starts decaying.
This is a far-cry from common DNA testing companies such as 23AndMe and Ancestry.com, which only spit out your sequence and put the burden on you to figure out the implications.
(You’ll avoid using their inferior saliva testing methods, AND avoiding the privacy invasions frequently reported with both companies)
While other tests are certainly important, TruAge gives you a single objective measurement that provides individualized guidance for addressing your health concerns.
How To Use TruAge For The Best Results Possible
TruAge is one of the easiest blood tests you’ll ever encounter in your lifetime.
All you have to do is order the TruAge kit, which arrives at your home within 3-5 business days.
Follow the instructions on the kit and send your sample back to the TruDiagnostic lab.
Your results will be accessible online within 6-8 weeks, where you will discover your biological age and potential suggestions for lowering it.
I hate to say it, but it’s really that simple!
If you want more detailed information about how your sample gets processes in their diagnostic laboratories, go here.
Where To Order Your Own TruAge Diagnostic Kit
For all of my loyal readers and subscribers, I am offering a $50 discount when you use the code “JC50” at the checkout cart.
Simply click here and you will be taken to my landing page.
For more information about TruDiagnostic and how they plan to revolutionize medicine with their groundbreaking technology, watch this podcast I did with co-founder Ryan Smith.
If you want to dig deeper into epigenetic testing and biological aging, the blogs and tutorials on the TruDiagnostic website do an excellent job of simplifying the science.
And as always…
If you want access to the world’s best health optimization intel before anybody else finds out about it, subscribe to my email list!
