What's Your Bio Age?

We all know our chronological age (it’s pretty hard to ignore), but do you know your biological age? Your bio age is reflected in the health of your tissues, organs, and blood. And this age is determined by your lifestyle and other health issues rather than how long you've lived. Biological age reflects a combination of genetics, lifestyle choices over time, and other factors such as nutrition, exercise, and demographics.

Importantly, your bio age is a good way to predict age-related diseases and overall mortality, it's surprisingly more accurate than chronological age. In this blog, we’ll detail how to know what your biological age is and what to do about it.

Biological Age 101:

To put it simply, your bio age is the age of your health. Ideally, your bio age will be younger than your chronological age. However, if you’ve lived a life with poor diet and nutrition, little exercise, and excessive drinking, it’s likely that your bio age might be older than you are!

Other factors that can impact your biological health include:

• High stress levels

• Too little or poor sleep

• Tobacco use

• Biological sex

• Body mass index

• Sun exposure

• Diet and nutrition

• Alcohol use

The good news is, while you can’t turn back the clock on your chronological age, the same is not true for your biological age. Making positive changes to your diet and lifestyle will help to heal damaged cells and reverse your biological clock.

The TruAge Test:

The TruAge Test, one of the most accurate bio age tests on the market, uses epigenetic methylation to determine your biological age. To break it down, epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment will cause changes that impact your genes. Methylation is a natural process that manipulates DNA chains by adding in “methyl tags”, which will control the action of the genes. Methylation can be influenced by a wide range of factors, including:

• Diet

• Physical health

• Microbiome

• Mental and emotional health

• Exposure to tobacco smoke

• Alcohol consumption

• Exposure to environmental toxins

Too much methylation will negatively disrupt the normal functioning of the cell and make it harder for the cell to work efficiently. This decline in efficiency is what causes the signs we think of as symptoms of aging: greying hair, wrinkles, increased joint pain, and so on. Methylation testing will measure the patterns and length of these methyl tags on various DNA points.

Finally, artificial intelligence is used to link the pattern values to other factors like weight or environmental factors in order to predict overall mortality risk. Essentially, epigenetic methylation will give extremely accurate insight into how old your cells and DNA look. This can be older or younger than your chronological age.

By using advanced epigenetic DNA methylation testing, the TruAge Test is one of the best biological age indicators on the market today. This test examines over 900,000 biomarkers to get a true reading of your biological age and will reveal vital insight into your health.

What to do about your bio age:

While aging is inevitable, there are steps you can take to support healthy biological aging. Finding out your bio age is the first step in figuring out what to do next.

Once you’ve learned your biological age, some potential next steps include:

• Cut out bad habits like smoking and excessive drinking.

• Hit the gym more often.

• Work to better manage your stress levels.

• Get more sleep at night.

• Try intermittent fasting

• Reduce exposure to artificial toxins.

Unfortunately, for some of us, bio-age intervention will involve a more intensive treatment, likely involving multiple facets of your lifestyle.

At The Johnson Center, by using the results of the TruAge Test to determine your true biological age, we will work with you to create an all-encompassing health plan to get you looking and feeling younger than ever.

To learn more about the TruAge Test click here to contact us! If you have any more questions about your path to optimal health, email our office at thejohnsoncenter@gmail.com or call 276-235-3205.

The Johnson Center for Health services patients in-person in our Blacksburg and Virginia Beach / Norfolk locations. We also offer telemedicine for residents of Virginia and North Carolina!