Michael F. Roizen - RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be?

What would you do if I gave you a hundred dollars? Would you spend it? Or save it? Think of all the things you could do with it. You could buy tickets to a pro basketball game. Or a new pair of running shoes. You could buy an armful of flowers for someone special. Or just treat yourself to cappuccinos every morning for a month. Sure, you could do a lot with a hundred dollars, but you couldnt buy a condominium with it. Or a new car. You know exactly how far a hundred dollars goes. And thats one of the remarkable things about money.

Because money has concrete value, we can compare activities as diverse as spending a couple of hours watching hoops and paying the phone bill and then choose between them. We know that a hundred dollars will buy an evening out or a pair of shoes but not both. Money values allow us to evaluate our choices.

Im not going to give you a hundred dollars. Instead, Im going to give you something better: years of life. Im going to teach you how to add years to your lifehigh-quality, health-filled, vibrant years. Im going to show you how to live younger through a method that makes health decisions as easy to understand as it is to understand what that one hundred dollars is worth.

The biggest problem with understanding health care decisions is that we have no common currency for medicine. We have no way of measuring decisions as diverse as buckling our seat belts, exercising, or taking vitamins regularly. But thats about to change.

As complex as medical science can be, there are only two real questions in medicine: How long will you live? And how healthy and vigorous will your life be while youre living it? Whether the issue at hand is eating a nutritious diet, taking calcium supplements, or wearing sunscreen, the fundamental motivation for choosing any of these behaviors is to ensure a longer, healthier life. Unfortunately, medical studies and news reports almost never make it seem that simple. RealAge unifies an array of health topics by determining exactly how they affect youth and vigor. RealAge correlates these to a common measurementyears of life.

For example, think of the neighbor who looks as if shes in her early forties, but whos really sixty. And remember how surprised you were to learn that your coworker, who you thought was in his fifties, was only forty-three? Some people are young for their age: They are physiologically and mentally as active and vibrant as someone much younger. The sixty-year-old woman may have a RealAgethat is, a physiologic ageof only forty-five. Why? Because she has learned how to slow the pace of aging. Your coworker, on the other hand, has probably abused his body, causing it to age much faster than it should. Remember your school reunion: Even though everyone was the same chronologic age, people no longer looked the same age. Some people wore the years well, were young and exuberant, despite the passage of time. Others looked as if they had aged ten years more than everyone elseand they probably had.

Your RealAge is an estimation of your age in biologic terms, not chronologic years. If your RealAge is five years younger than your chronologic age, it means that your rate of aging is such that you are in the same shape physiologically as the average person who is five years younger than you. Likewise, if your RealAge is five years older than your chronologic age, you have aged to the same biologic condition as someone who is five years older. RealAge measurements allow us to quantify the age difference between our calendar age and our biologic age. Using the latest and most sophisticated computer technology and statistical methodology, RealAge is able to translate health risk into years of your life.

Better yet, the RealAge program shows every single one of us just how simple it is to become one of those people who really is younger than his or her years. We really can slow the pace of agingand even reverse it. Although weve never been able to talk about getting younger beforetime moves in only one direction, forwardnow we can. Even though you cant change your calendar age, you can make your RealAge younger. That is, you can have the health profile of someone who is chronologically younger. Best of all, its not that difficult to do. Slowing the pace of aging can be relatively easy and painless. That means you can start feeling more invigorated, energetic, and healthful almost as soon as you start the RealAge program. You wont just live longer, youll live younger.

More of us are living longer than human beings have ever lived before. Our life expectancy is increasing, and, barring unforeseen circumstances, most of us can expect to live into ripe old ageripe old calendar age, that is. Yet, how well you live is largely up to you. Most of us dont want to live to be ninety if the last thirty years of our lives are filled with illness, restricted ability, and dependence on our families or nursing care. We want to be able to play golf, tango, or climb a mountain right until the day we die. We want all those extra years to be quality yearsyears in which we write the novel weve always dreamed of writing or learn how to paint. We want those years to be years when we travel the globe, visiting the far-off places weve only read about. We want to have fun with our grandchildren and enjoy our children as adults. We dont want to give up the things that make our lives worth living.

Longer lives dont mean much if they arent active lives. That is what RealAge is all about: making simple decisions in our day-to-day lives that will stave off the biologic aging processes that make our old age feel old.

Every one of us was born with a potentialthe potential of who we will become. Part of this potential is socialthe kind of education you get, the job you take, the opportunities and happenstances that come your way. The other part of this potential is biologic. How long and how well will you live? How healthy will you be? For far too long, the medical community has written off aging as something that is purely genetic, assuming that a persons whole life is written in the genes with which he or she is born. The more we know about genetics, our biologic inheritance, the more we know that this assumption is not true. Studies continue to show that for most of us, lifestyle choices and behaviors have far more impact on longevity and health than does heredity. Your genes (the elements that carry inherited information) define your basic biology, but how you interact with the world around youwhether through food choices, exercise, or social connectionsis how