How quickly are you aging?

“Investments in your health in middle age will have payoffs in old age.”

“What happens to us at the end of life has its roots many years prior.”

Those are key messages from “Calculate the Speed of Aging,” an article in the July 14, 2015, issue of the Wall Street Journal. The article further proclaims that the investments “should be in diet and exercise.”

Hooray for the Wall Street Journal! Of course, the messages are not from the writer of the article, but are quotes from researchers on aging from various institutions.

“Intervention to reverse or delay the march toward age-related diseases must be scheduled while people are still young,” is a quote, referenced by the article, from a study published on-line last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study strived to identify key factors that affect biological aging, which the researchers define as “the declining integrity of multiple systems.” (Aging experts say that, as yet, there is no standard clinical measure of biological age.)

The findings are from a study of 954 men and women of the same age. The objective was to calculate the individual aging rates by comparing various measurements of their health at ages 26, 32, and 38. The data came from a study being conducted in Dunedin, New Zealand, of a group of young people all born in 1972 or 1973.

The research team chose a set of 18 biomarkers that “tracked the function of organs such as the liver and kidneys, the immune and metabolism systems and dental health, among other measures.”

“Participants who showed accelerated aging in the biomarker tests also performed worse on other tests typically given to elderly people to gauge aging,” tests such as balance, coordination, grip strength, and cognitive abilities.

I give talks on aging. What I advocate is consistent with this research. But what I advocate is much more basic. It’s this:

·        The state of your health depends on the state of your functioning cells.
·        The body’s cells are constantly being damaged and the body is constantly repairing, replenishing, or replacing the damaged cells.
·        If your body is functioning optimally, your body will repair, replenish, or replace all malfunctioning cells.
·        Biological aging begins when the repair rate can no longer keep pace with the damage rate. 
·        Biological aging progresses as the percentage of malfunctioning cells gets larger.

To delay aging, our job is to reduce the rate of cellular damage and support the rate of cellular repair.

My talks are about what you can do to reduce the damage and to support the repair.

Diet, exercise, and lifestyle are critical. So are nutritional supplements.

Nutritional supplements can be highly effective in helping the body both reduce the rate of damage and support the repair rate. They are especially important as we get older, when the body’s ability to repair itself is in decline.

But I digress into topics that take hours to cover.

Here are a couple blogs that may interest you:

·        What is aging?
·        What causes aging?