While most people don’t care about biological age, Steve Horvath figured out how to calculate biological age long before anyone else. In 2011, Horvath, then professor of genetics at UCLA, published pioneering research showing that chemicals trapped in our saliva can closely monitor human health and decline.
“It was a very interesting finding at the time that you spit into a glass and measured your age,” Horvath told Insider. “It was largely ignored.”
More than a decade later, there are many long-lived companies promising to measure your biological age with saliva or blood analyzes based on Horvath’s discovery. “It’s good to see that,” Horvath says. “But there’s also the danger that over-enthusiastic people will offer things, and the science hasn’t gotten to the point yet. This makes me very nervous.”
How do biological age detection kits work?
Test kits now cost hundreds of dollars and require DNA from your saliva, cheek cells, blood or urine. All of these tests work by measuring chemical signatures in DNA that change over time and in response to both environmental and biological influences, such as our genetics and lifestyle. Basically, these tests measure how quickly or slowly we age.
But Horvath, now principal investigator at longevity startup Altos Labs, says consumers shouldn’t take all these flamboyant DNA-based biological age estimates too seriously for now. Horvath said, “The most important thing I want to say to the consumer is: only do it if you have a sense of humor. “People should be comfortable with it,” he says.
By the way, the biological age test does not show the full health of a person. There are other meaningful indicators such as blood pressure, weight, cholesterol and blood sugar to consider.
GrimAge watch
Horvath says the gold standard, which he calls the GrimAge watch, is our “best predictor of death risk” to date. The GrimAge test measures chemical changes in 1,030 different letters of our DNA to roughly determine our rate of aging. But Horvath warns that even GrimAge should not be used as a mortality calculator.
Biological age tests measure how your health stacks up relative to the years you live today, and therefore cannot accurately predict what your future health will be like decades from now. For now, these tests are not very clinically meaningful. But Horvath hopes that doctors will one day be able to test patients for biological age and then help prolong life and reduce biological age by recommending anti-aging pills or other interventions that have yet to be invented. Horvath said, “We haven’t reached this point yet for various reasons and most importantly; We don’t have a pill,” he says.
But there are some lifestyles and suggestions that really slow down aging, and Horvath has four recommendations. First, Horvath says, people hoping to increase their health and longevity should focus on simple, evidence-based things that science has already shown to slow human aging. These can measurably reduce the progression of a person’s biological age; Not smoking, increasing vegetable consumption, exercising, and reducing chronic inflammation (which can eventually lead to problems like cancer and heart disease) are listed.
“Everything you know about a healthy lifestyle seems to affect these biomarkers,” Horvath says, advising his closest friends not to spend their money on expensive DNA tests: “Just don’t smoke, exercise, eat your vegetables.”
As he personally discovered (as he did when he turned 40), one of the fastest ways to improve your biological age is to quit smoking. She also eats less sugar and chocolate than she used to, and sticks to her “health-hungry” diet.
Using his own clock as an indicator, he says these changes have reduced his biological age over time and “has had an impact on me,” he says.
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