Biological age may really just be a number.
Biological (or epigenetic) age is arguably more important than chronological age. But what happens if your cells are aging faster than the calendar says? Can you reset your biological age and live a longer, healthier life? Science may offer the answers.
We are not necessarily as old as we look. That’s because many scientists don’t measure “age” chronologically. Our cells may age at a slower or faster rate than our age as marked by the calendar. Chronological age refers to the actual time a person has been alive. Biological age is a more amorphous concept that considers an individual’s physical health, functionality, and molecular profiling, which can be influenced by genetics, lifestyle, and diet. However, as measured by biological or epigenetic clocks, age may have a much more significant role in governing how long we live and how healthy we remain as the years pass.
Our epigenetic clocks begin ticking before we are born. They appear soon after the embryonic stem cell stage and continue uninterrupted until the day we die. The clock ticks faster or slower, depending on the wear and tear we experience. “Aging is an unintended consequence of processes necessary for the development of the organism and tissue homeostasis thereafter,” according to the Clock Foundation, a nonprofit working to speed the availability of treatments that help improve health and life expectancy. That concept implies that while we can tinker around the edges (don’t smoke—or quit smoking if you’ve picked up this harmful habit), aging is an irrevocable part of being human, and there’s not much you can do about it. Other experts beg to differ, claiming that aging can be considered a disease.
Is aging a disease? Or is it a risk factor for what is usually referred to as age-related diseases? The World Health Organization (WHO) now recognizes aging as a disease. We’re not just talking about semantics. How we regard a disease—whether it is separate from or integral to aging—will guide scientists searching for new therapies to address it, such as preventing cancer and heart disease. We must be careful here, though. Many diseases are caused by factors other than age, making it more challenging to correlate a particular disease with biological age.
Since the advent of antibiotics, vaccinations, and significant advancements in public hygiene, the primary determinants of morbidity and mortality have shifted toward age and sustained exposure to environmental factors, such as pollutants, often interacting with genetic predispositions. With the average lifespan on the rise, chronic illnesses, notably neurological disorders, are burgeoning alongside associated costs.
Unlike the acute impact of infectious diseases or accidents, the detrimental consequences of aging and environmental hazards manifest gradually over extended periods. An intriguing theory suggests that environmental influences may accelerate biological aging, a notion supported by findings that dietary restrictions, known to prolong “health span” (the period of life during which one is healthy), can mitigate the adverse effects of environmental stressors.
“Both age and environmental risk factors are associated with the accumulation of somatic mutations in mitotic cells and epigenetic modifications that are a measure of ‘biological age,’ a better predictor of age-related morbidity and mortality than chronological age,” wrote Pablo Knobel, Rachel Litke, and Charles V. Mobbs, scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, in a 2022 study about how environmental risk factors impact neurological conditions.
The researchers delved into the notion that environmental hazards like smoking and air pollution may exacerbate neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease by hastening biological aging through persistent epigenetic changes. Understanding these mechanisms holds promise for devising interventions to mitigate the harmful effects of aging and environmental exposures.
A study published in Nature Climate Change in August 2025 revealed that exposure to heatwaves may accelerate biological aging and increase susceptibility to health issues. The study, which followed 25,000 people in Taiwan over 15 years beginning in 2008, assessed various health indicators, including liver, lung, and kidney function, blood pressure, and inflammation, to reach its conclusions. The researchers determined that a cumulative increase of 1.3 degrees Centigrade (34.34 degrees Fahrenheit) in temperature correlates with an acceleration of biological age by approximately eight to twelve days. The research represents a “paradigm shift” in how we understand the impact of excessive heat on biological aging over a lifetime, according to some experts.
“If heatwave exposure accumulates for several decades, the health impact will be much greater than we have reported,” said Dr. Cui Guo, at the University of Hong Kong, who led the research. The effects were especially pronounced in children, older adults, and manual workers who are required to spend their days outdoors. An earlier analysis in the U.S. found that “high exposure to extreme heat was associated with faster cognitive decline for [Black people] and residents of poor neighborhoods.” The problem is expected to worsen as global temperatures continue to rise. Predictions indicate a 70 percent chance that global temperatures will increase by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the coming years.
The epigenetic clock has proven fairly reliable as a predictor of functional decline and age-related diseases. Biological age is associated with a range of common illnesses, including lung disease, chronic bronchitis, pulmonary fibrosis, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, fatty liver, respiratory function, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease.
The aging process differs from individual to individual. A significant part of the aging process involves genetic factors. Another aspect of this is epigenetics. That is, it is based on environmental influences: what we eat, how much (or how little) alcohol we consume, whether we smoke or not, what kind of environment we are exposed to (how much pollution is in the air and water, for example), and who we spend time with. Many scientists are optimistic that we will soon see remarkable advances in this field.
Scientists have been studying specific biomarkers that indicate the rate at which we age or the functional capability of a person or organ, and how these change with age. Biomarkers aren’t new; scientists have been aware of them since the 1980s.
These biomarkers (or aging markers) are divided into two types: histology-based data—histology is the study of microscopic structures—(including chemical changes to DNA, which is called methylation), and clinical biomarkers obtained from blood chemistry, anthropometry (physical measurement), and organ function test measurements.
Still, we aren’t sure about the relationship between chronological and biological age. As scientists continue to learn about the impact of epidemiology on the aging process, they are still unable to explain or reveal the underlying mechanisms of epigenetic aging. That’s another way of saying that we may have to wait a while before we can prescribe a drug that will reset the epigenetic clock and give us more—and healthier—years of life. That’s why such importance is attached to health span.
Methylation refers to the vital process that governs how our genes change when our cells replicate and repair (a process that occurs constantly). Methylation is a process involved in epigenetics, which refers to how environmental factors and lifestyle choices influence gene expression. DNA methylation regulates gene expression, much like a light switch. (More technically, compounds or chemical tags called methyl groups attach to some DNA molecules as we age, turning them on and off).
The higher the proportion of methylated DNA in specific locations in the body (cells, tissues, and organs), the greater the acceleration of the aging process. That’s why methylation is crucial in determining how our cells are aging. Smoking can ramp up methylation. “Tens of thousands of locations gain methylation when you smoke,” says aging researcher Steve Horvath, according to a January 2024 article in NPR. He developed the epigenetic clock used as part of the GrimAge test—“a form of DNA methylation age predictor.” (Horvath’s GrimAge Test is named after the Grim Reaper. Other tests, like myDNAge, are based on Hovarth’s work.) Obesity can also increase methylation.
“Conversely, if you eat vegetables, if you are lean, if you exercise, that slows methylation age,” Horvath adds, pointing out that we can “use methylation to measure time in all cells that contain DNA.” However, some changes due to methylation can be positive—especially during pregnancy. Adequate methylation is critical for fertility and the developing embryo and could decrease infertility and pregnancy loss seen in women with endometriosis.
According to Dr. Douglas Vaughan, director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute at Northwestern Medicine, lifestyle changes can reverse methylation. “You can alter your fate with diet and exercise, for example,” he says. Dr. Vaughan notes that the reversal can occur relatively quickly in experimental animal models and may also occur in humans. That’s the good news.
Will there be an anti-aging pill or some other magical elixir or treatment that will spare us the need for dieting and exercising? If that occurs, it will still be in the future. The problem is that before we can intervene, we need to know the location of the relevant targets in the body, and we currently do not. In short, methylation is a reliable method for predicting lifespan and health span. That’s what makes it such an important biomarker of aging. It is, in fact, the “first accurate multi-tissue biomarker of aging,” which provides an approximate age for multiple tissues and organs in humans.
Although methylation may be an essential biomarker, it is by no means the only one. Several alternative biomarkers have been proposed by scientists, including female scents, an individual’s protein profile, an individual’s face, and a biomarker that relies on brain imaging to predict an individual’s ‘true’ age.
To support healthy aging, it may be wise to avoid opposite-sex scent cues in the absence of a desirable mating context. If you want to stay younger longer, maybe you should stay away from scents emitted by the opposite sex in the absence of an attractive member of the opposite sex. A 2024 study by a team from the University of Otago and the University of New South Wales, led by Mike Garratt, a senior lecturer in the department of anatomy at the University of Otago, found that exposure to female odors had an adverse effect on mortality and reproductive aging in male mice.
“This provides an example of how information detected by our sensory systems—what we see, hear, and smell—can have long-term effects on our bodies and even influence health and aging,” Garratt says. The researchers found that males exposed to female olfactory cues (chemical smell signals) from middle to old age had reduced fertility later in life, and those males exposed to female odors in conjunction with mating also showed an increased mortality rate.
For the experiment, the mice were placed in different environments to measure the impact of female odors on their fertility and life expectancy. Some males were alone, others shared a cage with females, some were exposed only to the scents of absent females, and a fourth group was exposed to both female presence and their odors. The results showed that mice exposed to female odors from middle age until their old age experienced reduced fertility. Older male mice in the experiment had fewer sperm, smaller testicles, and other signs of reduced fertility compared to younger ones.
Apparently, mice can be frustrated, too. “Thus, the perceived presence of females via olfactory cues within the environment, when not matched to the physical presence of those females in the environment, impairs later-life fertility,” Garratt and team write, even though they acknowledge that the mechanisms for reduced mortality in their experimental animals exposed to female odors “remain to be established.”
The scientists found that by exposing male mice to the scent of unknown females during middle to old age, they decreased the number of litters mice could sire later in life. If these female-odor-sniffing males were allowed to mate, they were also more likely to die earlier than males who didn’t smell outsider females before mating.
The same effect, Garratt says, could also influence humans. Males exposed to female olfactory cues from middle to old age (10 to 24 months in mice) had a reduced lifespan, irrespective of whether they had also been allowed to mate with females earlier in life. “Males that were exposed to female odors in conjunction with mating also showed an increased mortality rate when they were exposed, indicating that olfactory cues from females can increase male mortality in some environments,” the researchers write. They believe that, in mice, pheromones play a crucial role in reproduction. At the same time, other sensory signals in humans may have similar effects, particularly by inducing chronic stress, which can have a significant impact on health.
However, there is no doubt that pheromones may play a significant role. Pheromones from mates can accelerate aging in worms and fruit flies by activating brain pathways related to reward and mating. By contrast, mating fruit flies live longer. In some mammals, however, higher reproductive activity in early life tends to result in a shorter lifespan. Exposure to specific adult mouse odors can delay puberty in female mice, allowing them to live longer. Garratt writes: “It is known that sensory cues influence the release of hormones that can have short-term physiological effects on animals and humans. These effects can conceivably ‘add up’ and extend to influence our health.”
All the scientists can say with certainty is that their results “show that exposure to female odors can influence reproductive aging and mortality in male mice, highlighting that sensory perception of mates may be an important driver of life-history trade-offs in mammals.”
While DNA methylation is considered the best measurement of biological age, the proteome—the entire set of proteins present in the body at a given time—is regarded by some researchers as a more accurate gauge of how old a person is in terms of how their cells are functioning, rather than their chronological age.
A machine learning-powered blood test that analyzes 240 proteins to gauge a person’s rate of biological aging is being promoted as an indication of dying prematurely of any cause as well as predicting the person’s risk of developing 18 major age-related diseases including diseases of the heart, liver, kidney, and lung; diabetes; neurodegeneration, such as Alzheimer’s disease; and cancer.
In the summer of 2024, researchers at the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital identified a set of 20 aging-related proteins that they say accurately capture 91 percent of their age prediction model. They based their findings on a study of 45,441 participants, aged 40 to 70 years. The Mass General researchers maintain that their proteomic clock provides a first insight into the pathways that form the biological basis for multimorbidity. These findings have not been validated independently.
A person’s face may serve as a biomarker itself, thanks to a new AI tool called FaceAge. Results of a study published in May 2025 at Mass General Brigham Hospital used a photo of a person’s face to predict biological age and survival outcomes for patients with cancer. Investigators from Mass General Brigham found that patients with cancer, on average, had a higher FaceAge than those without and appeared about five years older than their chronological age. That cohort had a lower survival rate, particularly for those who seemed to be older than 85, regardless of sex. The researchers also found that FaceAge outperformed clinicians in predicting short-term life expectancies of patients receiving palliative radiotherapy.
“We can use artificial intelligence to estimate a person’s biological age from face pictures, and our study shows that information can be clinically meaningful,” said co-senior and corresponding author Hugo Aerts, director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) program at Mass General Brigham. “This work demonstrates that a photo, like a simple selfie, contains important information that could help to inform clinical decision-making and care plans for patients and clinicians.”
How old someone looks compared to their chronological age really matters—individuals with FaceAges that are younger than their chronological ages do significantly better after cancer therapy.” The tool was trained on 58,851 photos of presumed healthy individuals from public datasets and then applied to photographs of more than 6,000 cancer patients. The investigators are testing FaceAge to see whether it can predict diseases, general health status, and lifespan.
A study, released in 2025, suggests that brain scans may be superior to previously reported ‘clocks’ at determining the actual biological age of an individual. Scientists involved with the research believe that the volume of gray matter in the brain is a key to the command of language and thinking and that, along with other characteristics, can predict how quickly a person’s ability to think and remember will decline with age, as well as an individual’s risk of frailty, disease, and death. “Imaging offers unique, direct insights into the brain’s structural aging, providing information that blood-based or molecular biomarkers alone can’t capture,” says Mahdi Moqri, a computational biologist who studies aging at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Another biomarker is perhaps better known—telomeres. Telomeres sit at the ends of the chromosomes—the structures that carry your DNA. (DNA is usually likened to a blueprint for the cells.) The telomeres are groups of nucleotides that provide a protective cushion for the chromosomes, preventing them from deteriorating.
However, as we age, our cells continue to divide, and the telomeres get shorter. The shorter the telomeres, researchers believe, the more likely we are to die early or develop a serious illness. There is a disorder called short telomere syndrome (STS), which causes individuals with the genetic mutation to age prematurely.
Research published in Nature Genetics in January 2023 suggests that DNA damage may play a crucial role in the aging process. Researchers at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands focused on an enzyme, RNA polymerase II, which transcribes DNA into RNA. This enzyme acts like a diligent secretary, taking dictation from the boss and conveying the message to the employees. If the process stalls, however, as it did in the mice the researchers were studying, it can disrupt gene expression and cellular pathways essential for vital functions that include “nutrient sensing, energy metabolism, immune function, and cellular damage repair, all known to be affected by aging,” according to the Press Rundown.
Accumulated DNA damage is believed to be the primary cause of this stalling. Mice that lacked smooth-functioning DNA repair machinery showed signs of premature aging and had significantly shortened lifespans compared to healthy mice. These findings aren’t likely to yield any therapeutic interventions, but they shed light on the link between DNA damage and aging.
The epigenetic clock doesn’t just differ from one individual to another. It can also vary from one community to another, even changing through different parts of a city. Northwestern Medicine’s Vaughan, for instance, noted that due to a distinct genetic variant, an Amish population in Indiana had protection against diabetes and cardiovascular disease that was lacking in other nearby residents. In laboratory experiments, Vaughan increased the lifespans of mice nearly fourfold with an engineered protein associated with this variant.
“This was a eureka moment,” Vaughan tells Allison Aubrey, food and health correspondent for NPR. Meanwhile, in South Chicago, a more impoverished area, life expectancy was 55, whereas in a wealthier neighborhood closer to Lake Michigan, it was as high as 92.
Other dramatic disparities have been identified in people with HIV, who tend to age at an accelerated rate. A study conducted by researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute examined more than 400 patients with chronic kidney disease, studying their blood biomarkers, skin autofluorescence, and epigenetic clocks. They found that their biological clocks were ticking faster than those of the average person, even after undergoing dialysis treatment. Biological clocks did slow down for those who received kidney transplants.
Whether more equality in lifespan can be established may depend on the ability to slow down the rate of aging in disadvantaged or ill populations. “I don’t know exactly what that’s going to be. It might be a drug. It might be a lifestyle intervention; for all I know, it might be gene editing,” Vaughan says.
There may be some wisdom in the adage: You’re only as old as you feel. Studies by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer and Antonio Terracciano, a psychologist and gerontologist at Florida State University College of Medicine, demonstrate that in many cases, the subjective sense—how people perceive themselves—may play a vital role in slowing the aging process. People’s perception of their own age can differ markedly from person to person. People between the ages of 40 and 80, for example, tend to think they are younger than they actually are. People in their 60s may say that they feel like they are 50 or 55, or sometimes even 45 years old. Rarely will they admit to feeling older.
In one of Langer’s experiments, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, eight men in their seventies were placed in a monastery in New Hampshire and asked to imagine that they were in 1959. The furniture and decor were time-appropriate. The music they listened to and the shows they watched were also from the 1950s. There were no mirrors, only photos of the men in their prime. After just one week, the height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, and vision of the men who’d impersonated younger men had improved. Their fingers were more agile, and even their arthritis was alleviated. The benefits of their impersonation also showed up in their performance on intelligence tests. In almost every sense, those who had impersonated younger men seemed to have bodies that actually reflected their younger age. “Wherever you put the mind, the body will follow,” Langer said. “At the end of the [monastery] study, I was playing football—touch, but still football—with these men, some of whom gave up their canes.” She believes that “it is not the physical state that limits us,” but rather our mindset about our own limits and perceptions.
Teracciano’s experiments also found that subjective age correlates with specific physiological markers of aging, such as grip strength, walking speed, lung capacity, and even the levels of C-reactive protein in the blood, an indication of inflammation in the body. The younger you feel, the better the indicators of age and health. Terracciano and colleagues examined data collected from their 2008 and 2010 experiments, which involved 5,748 people aged 65 or older who were followed for four years. Cognition tests also improved, suggesting that the group that felt younger might be less likely to develop dementia.
“If people think that because they are getting older, they cannot do things, or cut their social ties, or incorporate this negative view which limits their life, that can be really detrimental,” says Terracciano. “Fighting those negative attitudes, challenging yourself, keeping an open mind, being engaged socially, can absolutely have a positive impact.”
However, ageism may also play a role in determining how people perceive their actual age. If they faced discrimination when trying to get a job, for instance, because they were perceived as too old, they would tend to feel old. Advancing age, regardless of subjective perception, also has an impact as stereotypes and social devaluation stigmatize older people.
Anyone can order a test to measure their biological clocks. The only problem is that the results can be unreliable. As of June 2025, no definitive test is available. Another issue is what to do with the results once you’ve got them.
Some of these tests assess age-related biomarkers in blood or saliva, while others determine the presence of chemicals that affect how genes are expressed, and still others measure telomeres. Some companies offer blood tests to measure cholesterol or hemoglobin A1C, a marker for diabetes. Generally, the number of these markers increases with age. That means a 45-year-old with a cholesterol level closer to that of an average 50-year-old may have a biological age older than their chronological age of 45.
Several companies sell tests ranging from $75 to $500 that analyze blood or saliva and compare changes in your epigenome to population averages. Results from the at-home tests, which are typically available after two to six weeks, often include information regarding metabolic health, genetics, and other risk factors for age-related diseases. However, as Fortune wellness reporter L’Oréal Thompson Payton writes, since “the tests aren’t independently evaluated, accuracy may vary across racial and ethnic groups.”
There are several home tests available, including Tally Health, Elysium, and Novos. Tally Health, co-founded by Harvard longevity researcher David Sinclair, relies on a cheek swab to assess DNA methylation (the most accurate indicator of biological age) and then recommends an action plan that includes intensifying exercise, taking supplements, and increasing the amount of fruit to eat.
Tally’s membership program offers users the opportunity to track their progress every three months. Tally’s test shows that women tend to “have an edge.” “Women age more slowly as measured by epigenetic clocks like Tally’s,” says Tally Health vice president and head of R&D Dr. Trinna Cuellar, “and we have a longer life expectancy,” states an article in Town and Country, quoting Cuellar. TruDiagnostic is one of the most widely used direct-to-consumer biological age tests; however, its cost is high—$500—and its findings are based on dried blood samples.
The GrimAge test is among the best-known tests to predict lifespan and health span. However, even the GrimAge test can’t be considered definitive; instead, it is useful only as a predictor of life expectancy based on the individual’s state of health and lifestyle.
These tests have mostly been met with skepticism from researchers. “Next-generation DNA methylation measures of biological aging developed to predict mortality risk and physiological decline are more predictive of morbidity and mortality than the original epigenetic clocks developed to predict chronological age,” says Daniel Belsky, an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, who developed an epigenetic clock. For his part, Vaughan believes the scores from these tests may be helpful when combined with other measurements, such as blood sugar levels.
Will a daily regimen of vitamins help retard the adverse effects of aging? Some experts believe so – if they’re the right vitamins. Bruce Ames, a biochemist from the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a list of 41 vitamins and minerals, including magnesium, as well as omega-3 fatty acids, that he believes may support healthy aging. Of these 41, though, he asserts that three in particular—magnesium, omega-3 acids, and vitamin D—are the most useful in maintaining and prolonging a healthy old age.
Magnesium (Mg), which is found in plants, whole grains, nuts and seeds “has been associated with increased all-cause mortality, poor DNA repair capacity, increased risk of lung cancer and various other kinds of cancer, heart disease, telomere shortening, and risk of stroke.” Omega-3 fatty acids are considered ‘good’ fat, which in certain forms (DHA and EPA), are found in fish and may support heart health. Vitamin D, Ames says, is “important to tune up metabolism,” noting that a deficiency of this vitamin causes—or is associated with—numerous diseases that affect healthy aging including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and brain function. Niacin (a vitamin B) has also been recommended for its benefits in helping older adults prevent atherosclerosis and cardiovascular events.
One major study, conducted by Johns Hopkins scientists, however, found no benefit from taking multivitamins. An analysis of research involving 450,000 people determined that multivitamins failed to reduce the risk of heart disease or cancer. Other studies found that they were also useless in retarding mental declines, such as memory loss.
If you want to stay younger longer, maybe you should stay away from the opposite sex. A 2024 study on mice, led by Associate Professor Mike Garratt of the University of Otago and the University of New South Wales, demonstrated that exposure to female odors had adverse effects on mortality and reproductive aging in male mice. “This provides an example of how information detected by our sensory systems—what we see, hear, and smell—can have long-term effects on our bodies and even influence health and aging,” Garratt says.
The researchers found that males exposed to female olfactory cues (chemical smell signals) from middle to old age had reduced fertility later in life, and those males exposed to female odors in conjunction with mating also showed an increased mortality rate. The reason for this effect is unknown, although pheromone exposure (among other factors) may play a crucial role, as pheromones are known to be involved in the reproductive cycle of mice.
The same effect, Garratt says, could also influence humans.
“It is known that sensory cues influence the release of hormones that can have short-term physiological effects on animals and humans. These effects can conceivably ‘add up’ and extend to influence our health.” The results highlight how sensory perception of mates may play a role in the life and health tradeoffs in mammals.
Metformin is the most prescribed oral hypoglycemic medication for type 2 diabetes worldwide. But it has also been promoted as an age retardant and a preventative medicine for such age-related diseases as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
“In the early 2000s, studies at the National Institutes of Health determined that metformin extends the lifespan and health span in laboratory mice,” states a 2019 study published in Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism. The study also showed that female mice benefited more than males. But metformin was no magic elixir; it failed to extend the longevity of fruit flies or rats.
However, its disparate effects are still being determined, and the dosage has yet to be optimized for each organism to maximize lifespan extension. Moreover, not all those who are prescribed metformin have benefited in terms of aging, and some have experienced side effects.
Before metformin becomes a mainstream therapy for anti-aging, a more granular understanding of its effects on humans is needed. Research is continuing to explore ways to reverse aging beyond metformin. One study of obese African Americans with vitamin D deficiency found that participants were able to reverse their biological age by almost two years in 16 weeks with a supplement regimen.
In an eight-week clinical trial conducted with adults between 50 and 72 years, researchers determined that biological age could be reversed over three years by using a treatment that included diet (low glycemic fruits, eggs, and liver), at least seven hours of sleep a night, exercise (30 minutes a day for five days a week), meditation and breathing exercises, and supplemental probiotics and nutrients. Cumin, turmeric, green tea, and mushrooms were also included in the recommended diet. The trial was conducted by Kara Fitzgerald, author of Younger You: Reduce Your Bio Age and Live Longer, Better, and her team.
“Every piece in our intervention [in the clinical trial] was designed based on what favorably influenced DNA methylation [how methyl groups interact with our DNA] and epigenetics,” says Fitzgerald. “The whole program was built brick by brick to sweet-talk gene expression and turn off bad genes, like genes associated with cancer or even inflammation, and turn on good ones.” She recommends that people begin adopting changes in their diet and lifestyle in their 30s before aging changes really “kick in.” But whether you’re young or old, current research suggests that when it comes to resetting the biological clock, it’s never too late to start.
We’re building a guide for everyday life, where experts will educate you about our world.
