What biological age says about your lifestyle and life expectancy

A biomarker that integrates a lifetime of experience offers a great opportunity for your health. With the biological age test, you can see how your lifestyle affects your ageing rate and calculate your life expectancy. Never before has it been possible to get such detailed feedback on lifestyle and information on your own ageing.

Chronological age determines retirement age

What’s the point of getting old, getting your driver’s license or finally enjoying retirement? Certainly, structure is important. Driving a car at 12 because you think racing drivers are great or retiring at 35 because you don’t enjoy your job is socially unfeasible. That would cause a lot of confusion. But order and structure are not everything in life and chronological age says little else about you.

For a child, nothing is more fascinating than being allowed to go to the movies or drive a car for the first time. They can hardly wait for their birthday and eagerly count down the nights until the big day. As the years go by, however, many people mentally distance themselves from their chronological age. For most adults, it is and remains the bland aftertaste of life, without which it would not be possible.

All of this applies to the chronological age that we calculate using the calendar. Today, science gives us a new, more differentiated view of things. Modern research allows you to see your true age – the so-called biological age.

Biological age tells your own life story

You’re probably familiar with this: People look like they are in their mid-30s, even though they are actually 50 years old. You are probably also familiar with the “used-up look” of some people who are just half as old as they look. The difference between chronological and biological age is particularly evident in these people.

One is our calendar – in which we count the Earth’s revolutions around the sun. The other is a measure of how quickly or slowly our body ages. How young or old your body, including the cells and everything that holds the cells together, is in a biological sense is what researchers call biological age.

Scientists equate a low biological age with higher vitality, adaptability, a well-functioning immune system and a smoothly running metabolism. As biological age increases, plasticity decreases. Metabolic waste accumulates in the body – the cells and their environment – and everything no longer runs so smoothly.

Phenotypically, in terms of visible characteristics, biological ageing can be seen in sagging skin and more wrinkles. However, this superficiality is only the tip of the iceberg. Increasing biological age leads to more cell debris and more mutations in the DNA. The risk of disease increases. There is often a lack of adequate fuel in the cells and the metabolism gradually gets out of joint. This has consequences for health.

This is where we come in with modern biological age tests. In this article, we show you how to measure your biological age and influence it. We provide you with a tool to help you stay biologically young for longer, even when the clock is ticking.

Epigenetics bundles and preserves all of life’s experiences in your cells

We have a test with which you can find out your biological age. With this test, we examine chemical molecules on the DNA that regulate it. The correct technical term for these molecules is epigenetic modification of a component of DNA, cytosine.

You can think of it like yellow post-its that the body sticks to or removes from your DNA as you get older! To put it simply: the older you get, the more notes you stick on or remove. The pattern of this “paper trail” on the DNA is casually referred to as the epigenetic code.

In addition to DNA, this code represents a kind of second information carrier that is located on (“epi”) the DNA strands. It regulates how the body uses the available DNA. It is a structural adaptation for altered states of DNA activation.

Epigenetics was already conceivable when Watson and Crick recognized DNA and its role in 1953. As early as 1942, Conrad Hal Waddington spoke of the “branch of biology that studies the interactions between genes and their products, which in turn give rise to the phenotype”.

Epigenetics links DNA to everything that happens to you in life. DNA remains virtually unchanged over the course of a lifetime. Epigenetic information changes intensively during – or because of – life. That is why we use this epigenetic code as an epigenetic clock. It integrates experiences from your life and thus allows us to make statements about your biological age.

You build your own epigenetics with your lifestyle

Whether you smoke and for how long, whether you had to go through phases of hunger or suffered from obesity for a long time, epigenetics stores these life experiences! The epigenetic code even immortalizes information from the time before you were born.

An important task of this code is to control gene expression. Epigenetic modifications – more new or less old post-it notes – determine how a cell uses the genes, whether the cell frequently translates the genes or, in extreme cases, switches them off. In this way, the body adapts to the environment by adapting the use of DNA.

Smoking changes the epigenetic code and biological age

Cells become epigenetically active by attaching a so-called methyl group – a chemical building block, a post-it note – to a gene. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh were able to show this in smokers.

The scientists asked 4,900 people about their smoking habits. They then counted the number of methyl groups on genes for lung function. Using the methylation pattern of these genes, the researchers were able to distinguish smokers from non-smokers, and the team was even able to distinguish between heavy smokers and occasional smokers.

For example, these methylations change how cells use genes that are involved in lung function. They ensure that cells make greater use of genes or switch them off completely. In this way, smoking presumably influences mortality and therefore life expectancy.

Particularly interesting: former smokers showed patterns similar to non-smokers. This means that epigenetic changes could be reversed by quitting smoking. You can therefore influence your biological age. To a certain extent, you can turn back the clock.

Epigenetic biomarkers in a test can be used to measure biological age

To measure biological age, researchers take a look at selected DNA locations. Ageing plays a special role in these gene loci, so to speak. Researchers – and we too with ourtest – measure the type and number of epigenetic changes at these gene loci.

To put it bluntly, this can look like this: if the gene locus has two methylations, it is considered biologically young. Five methylations indicate biological maturity and ten methylations or more mean that the epigenetic clock has been ticking for a long time and the gene locus is old news.

In practice, other patterns are also conceivable. Ten methylations instead of two could stand for low biological age and a linear relationship is not necessarily given. The fundamental correlation between methylation pattern and biological age is important.

To find out which methylation patterns represent which age, researchers compare the patterns of many thousands of people. Only these comparisons crystallize which of these patterns indicate young-at-heart people and which indicate rapid biological aging.

High BMI accelerates ageing and promotes disease

In the search for the grail of immortality, researchers continually came across the influence of food energy. It quickly became clear that a lot of energy from food leads to rapid ageing.

Eating more than necessary makes the epigenetic clock tick faster. This not only affects the wrinkles on your cheeks. Rapid biological ageing increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes. Not least because the cells no longer work smoothly and accumulate cellular waste. Fewer calories, on the other hand, slow down the ageing process and thus reduce the biological ageing rate.

The great opportunity we all have is to make individual lifestyle adjustments to slow down ageing. You have the power to reduce your biological age through your lifestyle. The neotes bioAgeTest gives you direct access to this process.

Personalized health with the biological age test

That’s interesting. But you certainly already knew that being overweight is unhealthy. Now let’s assume that you have never been overweight and have never smoked. Could it still be that you are one of those people who are pre-aged and have a higher risk of suffering from a chronic disease later in life?

To determine this risk, we offer you the option of determining your biological age! If this deviates from the chronological age in an unusual way, you will be given the opportunity to take countermeasures in good time.

You have the chance to look into your DNA. Review the past via your epigenome. You can do everything you need to do this at home. All you need is a prick on the finger and some blood from the fingertip.

The test determines the methylation pattern at characteristic methylation sites that reflect cellular ageing particularly well. With this epigenetic code it is possible to determine your biological age.

The test result may also contain information on risks for certain diseases. Modern preventive medicine has developed a range of measures to take the fear out of common chronic diseases.

Let’s assume you have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, even though you may still be perfectly healthy from a GP’s point of view. Why not undergo regular targeted tests based on the knowledge of your biological age? No heart attack occurs without any precursors. You just have to look early enough and then a lot can be avoided!

Let’s assume that your biological age corresponds to your chronological age. Can you still actively do something to influence your biological age and make it increase more slowly? Epigenetic research provides a clear, positive answer. For example, certain forms of nutrition (“Mediterranean diet”) and physical activity influence the epigenome. With targeted measures, we will enable you to actively reduce your ageing rate.

Furthermore, epigenetic age determination allows you to see the “before and after effect”. Immediately monitor the influence of changes in your life on your biological age.

This strategy slows down the ageing rate the most

Valter Longo’s research provides astonishing insights into the world of anti-ageing strategies. As a professor of gerontology, he researches calorie reduction and fasting.

Based on decades of research and studies on ageing in flies, worms, rodents, primates and humans, he outlines the Longevity Diet. A diet that has been proven to delay ageing and protect against disease.

The Longevity Diet contains occasional pseudo-fasting, the so-called Fasting Mimicking Diet. In experiments, Longo was able to show that pseudo-fasting activates regeneration by stem cells. Increased autophagy (cell cleansing) and low levels of insulin and IGF-1 were important for low ageing.

Such an approach slows down ageing as much as possible. It leads to less inflammation and less oxidative damage. It reduces the risk of age-related diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart attacks. Give it a try, even without fasting – and start by testing your biological ageto calculate your life expectancy.

You are also welcome to talk to our experts and find out about the latest developments in ageing research. Our free telephone consultation is a great way for people like you to interact. Take the opportunity to find out more about health, epigenetics and your true biological age. Book an appointment with our experts here.

Sources:

• Daniel L McCartney, Anna J Stevenson, Robert F Hillary et al. Epigenetic signatures of starting and stopping smoking. EBioMedicine. 2018.
• Jarrett D Morrow 1 , Barry Make 2 , Elizabeth Regan et al. DNA Methylation Is Predictive of Mortality in Current and Former Smokers. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2020.
• Yaru Liang, Zhao Wang. Which is the Most Reasonable Anti-aging Strategy: Meta-analysis. Adv Exp Med Biol. 2018.
• Lara Oblak, Jeroen van der Zaag, Albert T Higgins-Chen, Morgan E Levine, Marco P Boks. A systematic review of biological, social and environmental factors associated with epigenetic clock acceleration. Ageing Res Rev. 2021.
• Sebastian Brandhorst, In Young Choi et al. A periodic diet that mimics fasting promotes multi-system regeneration, enhanced cognitive performance and healthspan. Cell Metab. 2016.
• Valter D Longo, Rozalyn M Anderson. Nutrition, longevity and disease: From molecular mechanisms to interventions. Cell. 2022.