What Can You Do to Reduce Your Biological Age?
Steve Horvath figured out how to calculate a biological age way before anyone cared. In 2011, Horvath, then a genetics professor at UCLA, published pioneering research showing that chemicals tucked inside our saliva can closely track human health and decline. “At the time it was a very curious finding, that you spit in a cup and you measure the age,” Horvath told Insider. “It was largely ignored.”
More than a decade later, there are a whole crop of longevity companies who’ll promise to measure your biological age through spit or blood analyses based on Horvath’s discovery. “It’s nice to see,” he said. “But, there’s also a danger that overly enthusiastic people offer something, and the science isn’t quite there. That makes me so nervous.”
Test kits now cost hundreds of dollars, and require DNA collected from your spit, cheek cells, blood, or urine. (Researchers are also more easily determining the age of wild polar bears, elephants, zebras, horses, and more than 100 other non-human mammal species with the same technique.) All of these tests work by measuring chemical signatures in DNA, which change over time, and in response to both environmental and biological influences, like our genetics and our lifestyle. Essentially, the tests measure how fast or slow we are aging.
Excerpted from Insider
