Today, it‘s my 34^th birth­day. On my iden­ti­ty card it says, I was born in 1969 — this means I‘ve been on earth for 53 years. So, why then is it my 34^th birth­day? At least, I‘m not a Hol­ly­wood actress try­ing to dis­guise her real age.

Every year on the same day, we cel­e­brate our birth­days. What changes, is the num­ber of years we tell peo­ple when asked how old we have become. In our first 14–21 years, our chrono­log­i­cal age plays a rel­e­vant role in our lives: the older we get, the more we are allowed to do, from stay­ing away from home, drink­ing alco­hol, dri­ving cars or enter­ing into con­tracts. After this ini­ti­a­tion phase, most of us would pre­fer not hav­ing to add +1 each year — because most peo­ple want to get older. How­ev­er, what peo­ple real­ly don‘t want, is to age.

What Is Aging?

Aging can be described as the accu­mu­la­tive effect of dis­eases. The older we get, the worse our immune sys­tem func­tions. Bac­te­ria and virus­es our nat­ur­al defence mechan­sism can eas­i­ly fend off dur­ing our youth and early adult­hood, become seri­ous chal­lengers of our health in our later years. The rea­son: dur­ing our cell divi­sion activ­i­ties, more and more faulty infor­ma­tion will be copied and used by our organ­ism. That‘s why, for instance, the elder­ly can be seri­ous­ly affect­ed hav­ing caught a sim­ple cold. And that‘s why, nobody wants to get old — it seems to be a long process of con­tin­u­osly decreas­ing health and loss of qual­i­ty of life.

NOMIX & BIOCLOCK App

With our project NOMIX, we are ana­lyz­ing genet­ic and epi­ge­net­ic user data, to learn about our organism‘s way to cope with daily chal­lenges, such as stress, virus­es, bad food intake, seden­tary lifestyles, etc.. We work with health data of our BIOCLOCK app users to pro­vide each indi­vid­ual with a per­son­al­ized recom­mem­da­tion for a max­i­mized healthspan; i.e. the part of her total lifes­pan the indi­vid­ual stays fit and healthy. Users who fol­low our advice stay fit and max­i­mize their healthspan, in other words: they invest in their longevi­ty. As a result, their bioage is sig­nif­i­cant­ly lower than their chrono­log­i­cal age.

The offi­cial BIOCLOCK app will be launched in 2023, and the team has been work­ing on longevi­ty and its var­i­ous com­ponemts for quite a while. I myself have been inter­est­ed in mea­sur­ing my meta­bol­ic data since 2014 — and simce 2016, after hav­ing par­tic­i­pat­ed in the first Quan­ti­fied Self Europe Con­fer­ence, I knew the con­tin­u­ous col­lec­tion and man­age­ment of real-world health data of indi­vid­u­als would play a cen­tral role in the devel­op­ment of 4P med­i­cine: the pre­dic­tive, pre­ven­tive, per­son­al­ized, and par­tic­i­pa­to­ry approach that results in a par­a­digm shift with­in the health indus­try, as well as for each individual.

Longevi­ty

I have changed my lifestyle, and I‘m still con­tant­ly fine­tun­ing, here and there. These changes have result­ed in bet­ter over­all fit­ness, greater endurance, high­er con­cen­tra­tion — and a sig­nif­i­cant­ly lower bio­log­i­cal age than my cal­en­dar tells me. That‘s why I have decid­ed not to cel­e­brate my chrono­log­i­cal, but my bio­log­i­cal age, start­ing today! Alter­na­tive­ly, I could enjoy the addi­tion­al healthy years I have added to my lifes­pan — but it‘s more prag­mat­ic and eas­i­er to com­mu­ni­cate that I‘m actu­al­ly younger than my ID says.

We Can All Max­i­mize Our Healthspan

What‘s right for me, is right for you! Longevi­ty and a max­i­mized healthspan is no magic, or lim­it­ed to a happy few. Any­body can achieve more healthy years and live a much longer, happy life than the orig­i­nal­ly cal­cu­lat­ed lifes­pan sug­gests! If you want, you can also cel­e­brate your bioage instead of your chrono­log­i­cal age on your next birth­day! If you‘re inter­est­ed in longevi­ty you might want to pre-register for the BIOCLOCK app.

Bioage BIOCLOCK App birthday CODIS epigemetic genetics Immune System NOMIX