Scientists Say These Factors Are What Really Age You. And It's Probably Not What You Think.
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It feels like everyone is obsessed with turning back the clock lately, whether that means booking a botox appointment, leveling up your supplement game, or going full throttle on all kinds of fancy longevity treatments. And thanks to a growing body of research, we now know that it is possible to hack your health and slow down the pace of cellular aging (a.k.a. biological aging) to a certain extent.
But while the rate at which we aging has always been attributed to the unique combination of genetics, lifestyle factors, and your environment, a new scientific study suggests it might not be that complicated—and your genes might actually be the least important factor.
That’s great news if certain illnesses run in your family (disease can be a major component in cellular aging). It also means that you might have more control over aging than you think. Here’s what the study found, plus the factors that seem to matter more in cellular aging than others.
Meet the experts: M. Austin Argentieri, PhD, lead study author and a research associate at the Harvard/MGH Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations, and Health Disparities; Cornelia van Duijn, PhD, study co-author and professor at the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Population Health; Alfred F. Tallia, MD, MPH, professor and chair of family medicine and community health at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
What did the study find?
The study, which was published in Nature Medicine, looked at data from about half a million people who participated in the UK Biobank, a biomedical database that contains genetic, health, and lifestyle information.
Using that data, researchers analyzed the influence of nearly 165 environmental elements and genetic risk factors across 22 major age-related diseases and incidences of premature death.
There were a lot of different findings, but the most striking was that the factors related to lifestyle and a person’s environment played a bigger role in biological aging than their genetics did.
“Environmental factors explained 17 percent of the variation in risk of death, compared to less than 2 percent explained by genetic predisposition,” says Cornelia van Duijn, PhD, study co-author and professor at the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Population Health.
What kind of environmental factors contribute to aging?
Environmental factors include the things that surround you in your day-to-day life that can influence your health, like the amount of air pollution you're exposed to or where you live. The researchers found that the following environmental factors had the biggest influence on aging:
Household income
Socioeconomic status
Home ownership
Employment status
Whether people lived with a partner
What kind of lifestyle factors contribute to aging?
Lifestyle factors usually refer to daily habits and personal choices a person makes that can influence their health. The biggest contributors to aging included:
Smoking
Level of physical activity
Amount of sleep
Going to the gym at least once a week
This particular study didn’t look at diet, which is usually considered a big lifestyle factor. “Diet was a very difficult factor to assess in our study. We don't have a lot of answers on diet,” says M. Austin Argentieri, PhD, lead study author and a research associate at the Harvard/MGH Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations, and Health Disparities.
"This does not mean that diet might not be important for mortality and aging—it probably is—but rather that we just did not have reliable enough assessments of diet in the UK Biobank to satisfy our strict quality control criteria," Argentieri says.
How do these factors impact our cellular and brain aging?
Experts agree that environmental and lifestyle factors clearly play a “huge role” in aging, says Alfred F. Tallia, MD, MPH, professor and chair of family medicine and community health at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. But exactly how they impact our bodies and aging depends on which one you're looking at, van Duijn says.
One big factor? “We find major differences if we zoom in on diseases,” she says.
Disease can cause cells to age faster, because the stress of fighting illness can lead to cellular damage, inflammation, and disruptions in normal cellular processes, explains Dr. Tallia.
For example, smoking is a major player in some diseases (it can increase the odds of developing certain cancers, among others), but it wasn’t the major player in every disease. And environmental stressors, like toxins from air pollution, can greatly also accelerate aging and play a factor in the development of illnesses like cardiovascular disease and cancer, Dr. Tallia says. Lifestyle factors—think, smoking, drinking, lack of exercise—can also accelerate aging.
Do genes play a role at all?
Yep, genes still play a role, especially because they can contribute to the development of certain genetic diseases. Still, the amount that genetic risk contributes to some chronic disease varies by disease, says Argentieri, adding, "dementia, breast cancer, and ovarian cancer are much more influenced by genetics than diseases of the lung, heart, and liver."
But it can be hard to pin down exactly how likely someone is to develop a disease or condition based on genetics alone, Dr. Tallia says. That's why lifestyle and environmental factors are so important.
“The more an individual can take control in their lives and create healthy lives through adapting to stressors in a resilient way, the better,” he says.
Is it possible to reverse biological aging?
Research into biological aging is still ongoing, but there’s some data to suggest that you can dial back your biological age by making these lifestyle changes:
Aim for at least seven hours of sleep a night
Eat a plant-forward diet
Try to maintain a healthy weight
Get at least 150 minutes of exercise a week
Scale back on alcohol
Avoid smoking
Use sunscreen
Maintain good oral hygiene
Do your best to stay on top of your stress levels
Ultimately, doctors just recommend doing your best when it comes to making lifestyle choices that influence your biological age and disease development risk. Even smaller changes can have a big impact down the road.
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