Transcription
I recently joined this competition called the Longevity World Cup. It's a biological age reduction competition based on two validated biological age clocks that are calculated from common blood markers called Bort's age and Pheno age. Pheno age is simpler, with only nine biomarkers plus chronological age. Whereas Bort's age is more comprehensive, with 22 biomarkers.
I actually ranked number one for the bigger Bort's clock with an age reduction of 21.1 years and ranked number two for the Pheno age. Of course, I'm not 10 years old based on the Bort's age. I'll explain what it means in a moment. But basically, if you were to only look at my blood markers phenotypically, it would be similar to a 10-year-old. I achieved this with pretty much the ideal set of biomarkers that you'd want to have. And I did it by tinkering with my lifestyle, diet, supplementation, and exercise.
So, in this video, I wanted to walk you through the results. I'm going to talk about the science behind these biological age clocks. What changes did I make to achieve these results, and also how you can accomplish similar results.
Let's start with a more comprehensive Bort's age clock. It's a clinical blood biomarker clock trained to estimate biological age from circulating biomarkers. A 2023 paper by Jordan Bortz and colleagues found that the Bort's age predicts mortality risk in a data set of over 300,000 people in the UK Biobank. Their model reached a C-index of 0.778, which means that it could correctly rank survival risk between two people about 78% of the time.
The benefit of the Bort's age is that it's quite practical. You calculate it from 22 common blood markers that have high relevance and importance to things like heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, liver disease, and others. Bort's age also uses chronological age to convert risk relative to people of the same sex and chronological age.
So let's go through the results of the blood markers that allowed me to get such a good result with Bort's age. I took a blood panel of 100 markers, and I made sure I had these specific 22 markers included. So this is not some cherry-picked panel across multiple months or years. It was done from the same blood draw. You can see that not only are these specific two markers excellent, but all the 100 are.
Here's the immune panel. The immune panel for Bort's age includes white blood cell count, lymphocytes, neutrophils, monocytes, hsCRP, and vitamin D. Red blood cells include red blood cell count, mean corpuscular volume, mean corpuscular hemoglobin, and red cell distribution width. For liver enzymes: ALT, ALP, GGT, and albumin. Kidney markers: urea and blood urea nitrogen, creatinine, and cystatin C. Blood sugar: fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C. And lipids: total cholesterol and ApoA1. Additionally, sex hormone-binding globulin or SHBG.
Overall, you can see that Bort's age is influenced by things like your kidney markers, liver markers, your immune system functioning, your blood sugar, your lipids to a certain extent, and insulin sensitivity, as well as inflammation status. So, it's a pretty comprehensive overview of your systemic health, not just a single aspect of it.
The main theme or pattern that's associated with lower biological age based on the Bort's age clock is higher insulin sensitivity. That means having lower blood sugar, lower cystatin C as a measure of kidney function, higher ApoA1 which reflects insulin sensitivity, lower average blood sugar as measured by lower hemoglobin A1C. This indicates good metabolic health and low metabolic burden.
If you look at my overall blood work, you can also see my triglycerides are low and my insulin is also low, which is a sign of good insulin sensitivity. ApoA1 is also the apoprotein that's the equivalent of insulin sensitivity, similar to HDL. ApoB is the atherogenic particle, whereas ApoA1 is similar to higher insulin resistance. The ratio between lower ApoB and higher ApoA1 is optimal.
Strong immune system as measured by high lymphocyte percentage, but not immune hyperactivity like in autoimmunity. That would be with high white blood cells. If you look at my immune cells, then you can see strong immune function with high vitamin D, normal white blood cells as a sign of low autoimmunity and no infection. The high lymphocyte percentage is a sign of strong immune signal. To be honest, immune cells can fluctuate quite a lot depending if you've been sick recently or not. So, I'm not doing anything specific for these immune cells other than just having a good immune function with a healthy lifestyle and maintaining optimal vitamin D status.
Low inflammation, which reflects in low hsCRP. Basically, you want to keep it as low as possible. Low CRP reflects low systemic chronic inflammation. CRP can fluctuate as well if you're sick, but if you're not sick, then it reflects quite accurately overall systemic inflammation status. So, your CRP should be as low as possible. And the healthiest people have close to zero CRP. If you have some extra body fat or your metabolic health isn't that good, your CRP would be around 0.5 to 1.5 milligrams per liter. Whereas the optimal CRP is 0.1.
Lower liver enzymes such as low GGT, low ALT, and ALP. This is an indicator of low burden on the liver and low liver damage. Usually, excess body fat, excess visceral fat, or too high triglycerides raise liver enzymes. What I've noticed is that the amount of training and exercise influences liver enzymes. Over the past few months, I've had a much lower volume workout plan, and I've worked out about half as much as I did before. And this might have lowered my liver enzymes a little bit. So, it's not as straightforward as having low liver enzymes as much as possible because I've seen some overweight people who don't exercise, have low liver enzymes, but they're still overweight, which is not optimal.
Good kidney function, especially as measured by cystatin C, not creatinine. Creatinine is influenced by muscle mass and exercise, whereas cystatin C isn't, which makes it a true biomarker of your kidney function. If you want to measure your kidney function, measure cystatin C. Creatinine can give you some additional information, but in the absence of cystatin C, it can be misleading.
And lastly, nutrient status measured by red blood cells and albumin. Higher is generally better. Albumin is influenced by protein intake and calorie intake overall, whereas red blood cells are influenced by iron status and overall nutrient status.
As a general overview, for adults, it comes down to having good metabolic health. But that's not enough. You also need to balance adequate nutrient intake while being on the borderline of calorie restriction and not restricting your calories too much because calorie restriction will improve most of your biomarkers such as your liver enzymes, your blood sugar, your inflammation status. But excess calorie restriction can worsen other biomarkers such as it can weaken your immune system, lower your sex hormones, lower your thyroid functioning, and also lower your exercise performance. So generally speaking, you want to be leaner but not too lean. At least based on my own experience.
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Let's talk about the smaller version of Bort's age, Pheno age. Pheno age is a clinical blood biomarker biological age clock developed by Morgan Levine and colleagues. It's not a DNA methylation clock, but it uses chronological age plus nine clinical markers to estimate a phenotypic age linked to mortality risk. People whose Pheno age is at least 10 years lower than their chronological age have higher survival, whereas people with a 10 years higher Pheno age die sooner. A recent analysis on different generations in the UK and US also found that a higher Pheno age is associated with a higher risk of cancers. So Pheno age is a composite marker of multiple organ systems, similar to Bort's age. It's just a bit smaller.
When comparing Bort's age to Pheno age, then Bort's age has been seen to be slightly more accurate, about 11% more accurate, which the 2023 paper discovered. All the Pheno age markers that I measured are already covered in the Bort's age. The Bort's age just adds 13 additional blood markers, but Pheno age is still quite useful and it's a lot cheaper.
Another relevant topic is chronological age. Bort's age as well as Pheno age both are based on chronological age, which means that the results depend on your chronological age. As you get older, it is harder to have optimal blood markers because of the process of aging. However, Pheno age and Bort's age take that into consideration. So even if you were to be 60 or 50 years old, you could still have a biological age reduction based on these clocks that's about 20 years lower than your chronological age.
Dr. Michael Lusgarden from the Longevity World Cup, who's 55 years old, has shown this with his Pheno age. He got a score of 22 years lower than his chronological age. Objectively, my Pheno age markers are better than Michael's, which makes sense because I'm 20 years younger than him, but he gets a bigger Pheno age delta because he's older than me, if that makes sense. It's impossible for an 18-year-old to have a biological age that's 20 years lower because that would be minus 2 years. But it is possible for someone who is 30 or even 50 or 60 to have a biological age score that's 20 or 25 years lower. Regardless, Michael Lusgarden's biomarkers are in the top 1% for his age, which is why he got such a good result. And my own biomarkers are also in the top 1% of health.
I'll also mention the difference between these blood marker-based biological age clocks like Bort's age and Pheno age, and these epigenetic DNA methylation clocks like Dunedin Pace or some other Horvath clock. Dunedin Pace differs from Pheno age and Bort's age because it measures the pace of aging rather than estimating a person's biological age in years. Pheno age and Bort's age are built from clinical blood markers and are especially useful for predicting disease and mortality risk. Dunedin Pace, by contrast, is an epigenetic marker based on DNA methylation and is reported as a rate. One represents average aging, and values above one suggest faster aging, whereas values below one suggest slower aging. Dunedin Pace has also shown strong links to mortality, disease, disability, and cognitive decline. But its main strength is tracking how quickly biological aging appears to be progressing. However, the blood marker clocks may be more practical and directly tied to current clinical health risks. And in terms of longevity, you're going to die to something. And if your risk of dying to something is lower, then that's kind of more relevant than the speed of your biological aging.
Now, about two years ago, I was also ranked in this other competition, the Rejuvenation Olympics, that uses the Dunedin Pace clock. I decided not to pursue this test anymore because I think it has quite a few flaws if you use it as an individual, and it also is quite a lot more expensive than the blood marker-based clocks. If you get a Dunedin Pace score, let's say it's 0.6 or 1.2, then no matter what the result is, you don't necessarily know what to do to improve your test. Is your problem your kidneys? Is your problem your immune system functioning? Is your problem your inflammation status, or something else? You don't know that if you just look at the Dunedin score. Whereas you do know exactly what's the problem in your physiology and organ systems if you look at the Bort's age and the Pheno age because it's made up of a list of many biomarkers and blood markers. That's why I find these blood marker-based clocks a lot more useful and practical for most people. You're getting a lot more valuable information from them. They're cheaper and they're also more reliable. They fluctuate less.
These epigenetic age tests can fluctuate a lot. In fact, they can be different in the morning and the evening. So, you can literally get different results at different times of the day. Yes, blood markers also fluctuate. Your fasting blood sugar is lower in the morning than it is in the afternoon when you've already eaten. But the point is that it's standardized. Everyone takes blood work in the morning in a fasted state. That's common practice. That's what the doctors will tell you to do. That's what all the clinics will tell you to do. And that intuitively makes sense. You do all the blood work fasted in the morning, but you can do the epigenetic age clocks at any time of the day, and because of the circadian fluctuation in the epigenetic age, you're going to get different results.
All right, so let's talk about the specific routine that I followed to get these blood marker results. I've made a lot of other videos about my past routines, so you can find more longer versions of that in the description. Here's a quick overview, and I'll comment what I think influenced certain markers the most.
Number one, being lean is the most important thing. Excess body fat, especially excess visceral fat, harms your metabolic health and inflammation status. My visceral fat is very low because of being lean as a baseline, plus doing high-intensity interval training and consuming a diet high in polyphenolic compounds. I work out about three to four times a week with calisthenics or with a weighted vest. For the last few months, I've been having very short but intense workouts. I only do about two to three sets to failure, only one to two exercises. It takes me a total of 20 minutes. The total exercise duration is lower, but the intensity is higher. This might have lowered my liver enzymes since I'm spending less time working out, but my creatinine was slightly higher than usual because of higher protein turnover from the intense exercise.
My diet consists of potatoes, cottage cheese, fish like cod and salmon, beef, a few eggs per week, berries, fruit, whole grains, dark chocolate, and some nuts and seeds. My macros are about 1.4 to 1.6 g per kilogram of protein, which for me is 120 to 135 g as I weigh 80 kg. In practice, it's about one scoop of protein powder with one cup of yogurt and 10 grams of collagen. And for dinner, I have about 200 to 300 g of beef or fish. Carbohydrates make up around 250 to 300 g. I eat around 400 to 500 g of potatoes or some other carb source, 100 to 200 g of berries, and one serving of fruit like one apple, kiwi, or orange. Fats make up 70 to 85 g. I get it from the yogurt, meat, fish, eggs, and maybe 1 tbsp of olive oil. I add a handful of nuts with my yogurt like walnuts, pistachios, or pumpkin seeds. Fiber that makes about 40 grams per day. I get it from vegetables, carrots, broccoli, potatoes, blueberries, cauliflower, plus 10 g of psyllium husk mixed with the yogurt.
In terms of sleep, I sleep 7 to 8 hours consistently. Walking, I do about 8,700 to 10,000 steps a day, maybe 12,000 to 15,000 on some days.
My supplementation is quite minimal. Glycine 5 to 10 grams a day. Astaxanthin 12 milligrams a day. I tried lutein and zeaxanthin in this period, 20 milligrams and 5 milligrams, to see if it affects eye strain. Vitamin D 5,000 IUs with 120 micrograms of vitamin K2 for the winter months. Collagen 10 g a day and omega-3s 2,000 to 3,000 milligrams a day.
All right, so that's the end of this video. I have nothing else to add. I made this video because I thought you'll find this interesting and to share some updates I've made to my routines, the small updates that got me quite good results with the blood markers. All right, thanks for watching. If you want to discover your health percentage and get your roadmap to top 1% of health, then join the community using the link in the description.