Overview
Age is not the definitive factor it’s made out to be when it comes to our health.
We can use our age as a baseline for tracking our health and longevity, but it isn’t stagnant. For example, certain types of testing can help us compare our biological age to our calendar age in order to tinker with our wellness routine and achieve the milestones we’re after. With the right steps, we can slow down and even sometimes reverse the aging process.
When it comes to our biological age, or the measure of how well our body is actually functioning for whatever life stage we are in, there are many things that impact it. Diet, lifestyle patterns like exercise and sleep, and stress are all involved in forming our biological age, along with many other factors like blood sugar, inflammation, and genetics.
This week on The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m joined by Dr. David Sinclair to explore the topic of longevity and anti-aging and how he reduced his own internal age by more than 20 years.
Dr. Sinclair is a professor in the Department of Genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School, where he and his colleagues study longevity, aging, and how to slow its effects. More specifically, their focus is on studying sirtuins—protein-modifying enzymes that respond to changing NAD+ levels and to caloric restriction—as well as metabolism, neurodegeneration, cancer, cellular reprogramming, and more. Among other awards, he was included in Time Magazine’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” and Time‘s “Top 50 in Healthcare.”
Find David’s book, Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To
We dive into all this and more on this week’s episode. I hope you’ll tune in.