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Look Younger, Live Longer Give Yourself the Energy and
Looks You Had Ten or Twenty Years Ago

Thousands of Americans are younger today than they were five years ago. How is that possible? They have joined the RealAge Revolution. They have given themselves a makeover from the inside out. By following the specific age-reversing recommendations in my book RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be?, people who were previously much older physiologically than their calendar age have now taken ten, fifteen, up to forty years off their biologic age. (Men can be twenty-five years younger and women, twenty-nine years younger than their calendar age.) This is what we call giving yourself a RealAge Makeover: you can significantly transform your health, looks, and life.

And it can be so easy. For example, just developing the habit of calling friends in times of stress can actually make a real difference in your health and longevity. As word about the RealAge concept spread, and Americans started to see firsthand how small but simple—and often fun!—changes in their daily lives could transform their health, so many people have gotten the RealAge bandwagon that it's become a kind of revolution—a revolution back to great health. And nobody has been more thrilled to see it happen than I.

Since publication of the first book, we've learned more about the process of aging. While our team has been hard at work interpreting data from the latest clinical trails to keep the RealAge program on the cutting edge, readers of RealAge have been hard at work getting younger. For example:

• Katherine M., a forty-eight-year-old nurse with a busy schedule and a RealAge of fifty-five, knew she wasn't getting healthy nutrition. So she started taking calcium, vitamin D, magnesium, and folate supplements. In addition, she added lycopene to her diet by having spaghetti with marinara sauce once a week. As a result, even though she now has a calendar age of fifty-one, her RealAge is forty-five. She has an added bounce in her step and feels the ten years younger she has become. (She made her RealAge ten years younger as she went from a RealAge of 55 to one of 45.)

• Kenny T., a high-powered attorney of fifty-eight with a RealAge of sixty-six, started a stress-reduction program that included yoga and meditation. In addition, he began walking and paying more attention to safety issues such as wearing a seat belt while driving and a helmet when bicycling. These combined factors made his RealAge six years younger.

• I am most proud of Betty G., who works in my old department. Betty had a three-pack-a-day smoking habit that made her RealAge eight years older than her calender age of thirty-nine. She felt more than fifteen years older, and looked it, too. No one thought she could quit. She'd frequently be seen outside on a smoke break with cigarettes in both hands. Betty eventually got fed up with feeling so old and tired, and decided to give herself a makeover. She started a walking program; then she quit smoking. It wasn't easy, but she did it with the method described in Chapter 6. After five years completely smoke-free, she is well on her way to shedding seven of the eight years she had originally aged due to smoking. She now looks twenty years younger than she did. In fact, her RealAge is fourteen years younger than it was just three years ago (she did more than just quit smoking). She has literally made herself over. Friends who have not seen her in three years have asked how she was able to afford plastic surgery. She is proud to tell them she hasn't had any surgery; instead, she has changed her appearance from the inside out.

I find it incredibly exciting to see people making such changes—some easy, some difficult, but all crucial toward living younger, longer, healthier lives. This book updates what's been learned in the past several years and gives you all the information you need to transform yourself with a RealAge Makeover.

There's a lot in the realm of health and medicine we don't know, but we do know more than 80 percent of how to postpone, delay, or avoid the onset of age-related disease and the disability it causes. That's extremely exciting news! (It's different, however, from postponing aging itself. Postponing aging would mean living at the top of your curve to one hundred twenty or one hundred fifty years after your birth—something very different from what we can do now.) We now know how to delay until age ninety or ninety-five those age-related diseases that keep us from living at the top of the quality-of-life curve. And that's what the goal of the RealAge program is all about.

What Is RealAge?

It's most common, of course, when someone rudely asks you your age, to think in terms of calendar age. You are very aware (and may even grumble) when you pass the big milestones—for example, when you turn thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety. But this way of thinking—couching age only in terms of calendar age—does not do justice to the complex (and, happily, often reversible) process of aging. You have an age that more truly reflects how much your body has aged: your RealAge. It can be many years older or younger than your calendar age, depending on your choices—how well you care for your health and well-being. If your RealAge is five years younger than your calendar age, for example, 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 calendar age, you have aged to the same biologic condition as someone who is five years older. But you do not have to despair; the great thing about the science of the last twenty years is it shows you how to slow and yes, even reverse your aging. How to do that is the subject of this book. Instead of the one-size-fits-all nature of calendar age, RealAge reflects you as a unique individual, and the choices you've made for yourself.

When we consider this concept—that different people of the same calendar age may actually be older or younger depending on the state of their health—most people instinctively accept this is true. We've all had the experience of meeting someone we assume is one age, only to find out he or she is actually much older or younger. Perhaps you've met a new employee at your company who you thought was in her early thirties, only to discover later that she's actually in her mid-forties. Or perhaps you assumed your postal carrier was in his sixties, nearing retirement, and then were surprised to learn he's only fifty-five. What may be more surprising is that the calendar age you estimated for people is not that far from their RealAge (physiologic age).

Some people are young for their age: they are physiologically and mentally as active and vibrant as someone chronologically younger, because they've slowed the pace of aging by making healthy lifestyle choices that can help prevent age-related diseases. Others are old for their age: they have abused their bodies with unhealthy lifestyle choices, causing them to age much faster than they should have.

Despite how logical and intuitive the concept of RealAge is, it actually flies in the face of much of what was previously believed about aging. For far too long, the medical community had assumed that how a person will age is "written in the genes." But the more we know about genetics, the more we know that this 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 our genetic inheritance. Studies of twins in Denmark, Finland, the United States, and Asia all show the same thing: about 25 percent of how we age is in our genes and 75 percent results from our choices. Genes define basic biology, but how you interact with the world around you—whether through food choices, exercise, or social connections—is how you control the way your genes will affect your body.

In fact, behavioral choices account almost entirely for a person's overall health and longevity by age sixty. The older you are, the more your choices determine how long and how well you live. People who are still able to live young even when their calendar age is old weren't necessarily born with good genes nearly so much as they have made good choices. They exercise, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, and keep their minds engaged. It doesn't sound too hard, does it? And that's because it isn't. The RealAge program shows every single one of us just how simple it is to become one of those people who really are younger than their years.

By taking the RealAge test, you'll find out exactly how young or old you are. You'll get specific tips on how you can make your RealAge younger. Essentially everything you do contributes to or prevents aging. Eating a diet rich in healthy fats, exercising, and quitting smoking are lifestyle choices you probably already know are good for you and—you may never have thought about it exactly this way—prevent aging. But did you know that flossing your teeth nightly or using a cell phone can make a big difference in how fast you age? Flossing regularly can make your RealAge as much as 6.4 years younger (see Chapter 5). And did you know that folate, aspirin, and tomato sauce can help your arteries stay young? Getting 800 micrograms (µg) of folate a day reduces arterial aging and the chance you might develop colon or breast cancer, making your RealAge nine months to as much as four years younger (see Chapter 10).

Many, many of the choices that help prevent aging are easy to put into effect, yet have far-reaching effects on your health. For example, RealAge tells you the habits and foods that increase and decrease the rate of growth of specific cancers, and by how much, so you can choose what you want to do. These recommendations are not based on wishful thinking. Each is backed by data confirmed in four or more studies that looked at outcome, survival, or quality of life in human beings, not animals.

RealAge lets you know what your choices are and the relative value of each, so you can make the choices that are best for you. It's much less work than you think. It's often just a matter of being mindful and adopting easy good habits, instead of living without thinking about choices and accidentally adopting aging choices. Thinking consciously about the wide variety of choices in your daily life lets you adopt as habits those that consistently give you a Makeover from the inside out, your RealAge Makeover.

As I described in RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be?, published in 1999, the RealAge concept came to me when a friend, Simon Z. (a lifelong smoker), developed severe arterial disease. For some reason, stepping out of my role as doctor and into my role as friend made the concept flash in my head: people need to understand that because of the lifestyle choices they were making, their true age was actually different than their calendar age.

I had tried everything to get my friend Simon to quit smoking, with no success. Suddenly, I thought I might have the key.

"Simon," I asked him, "how old are you?"

Copyright © 1999, 2004 by Michael F. Roizen, M.D.