Name: The biggest myth about aging, according to science | Morgan Levine: Full Interview
Uploaded: 2026-01-23T18:26:09.000Z
Duration: 54 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

I study the science of aging, and my book is called True Age.

Adverbs of manner

My interest in the science of aging probably started when I was quite young, because my father was fairly old when I was born.

And so I became really aware of the aging process from a young age.

So at a time when maybe most kids weren't contemplating their parents disease risk and mortality, it was something I was always inherently concerned about.

And then when I actually went to college, I learned there was an entire scientific field focused on trying to understand the aging process and potentially even intervene in it.

And this really drove me to work on the science of aging.

So my current research really focuses on trying to actually quantify or measure aging.

So can we take all of the cellular molecular changes that people have undergone and actually give them a sense of how they're doing in terms of the aging process?

Are they aging slower than we would expect, or are they aging faster than we would expect?

We all age, but we don't all age at the same rate.

So my lab is really interested in can we actually put a number to that.

Can we measure how fast or slow a given person might be aging?

And we think this is really critical because it probably has implications for the risk of disease in the future, the remaining life expectancy, and other things that we all care about in terms of our health.

I think a lot of people don't realize how much power we actually have over our aging process.

So a lot of people think, oh, my life expectancy or my risk of getting something like cancer or heart disease is due to genetics, or it's just going to happen.

But we actually have a lot of ability to kind of modulate our potential risks, or at least the timing perhaps of when these diseases might occur.

So by actually having people understand the aging process, the biology that goes into it, and why that's important for disease, we think that this will actually help people take meaningful steps to slow the rate of aging and increase what we call their health span or their kind of time of life expectancy free from disease.

Chapter 1 how we measure biological versus chronological most people think of age or aging in terms of chronological time.

So we all know how many years we've been alive.

And we usually measure our aging in terms of that time.

So months, days, years since we were born.

And we put a lot of emphasis and importance on this measure, but actually this isn't the number that counts.

So the reason we've become so fixated on this idea of chronological age is because it's actually tied to what we consider this biological aging process.

So over time, living systems like humans or any other organism, actually kind of degrade and become less functional over time.

And we think of this as kind of the biological aging process.

So how are our cells function, Functioning worse than perhaps they were before?

And how have our bodies kind of changed over time?

And the important thing is that, unlike chronological time, this is something that's potentially malleable.

So we know this from looking at different species.

So you can compare a 10 year old dog to a 10 year old human, and clearly the rate at which their bodies have declined over that time Is quite different.

And we even know among humans, you, can look at two people for, say, 50 years old, chronologically, and clearly they may not look the same in terms of their overall health status and overall aging rate.

So really, it becomes important to understand the biological aging process, how far we've each kind of diverged over time, and what this might mean for our future health.

So there's actually a debate in the field Whether aging is universal.

Most scientists actually think that aging Is a universal thing among living systems.

And living systems will inherently change over time and decline.

But some of them actually do this at such a slow rate, what we call negligible senescence, that we actually can't observe aging in those systems.

So usually, to kind of tell how fast different organisms are aging, we look at their, what we call survival curves.

So do you see an increased risk of mortality In a population As a function of time?

And we think of that as the overall rate at which that type of species or type of animal or plant Is actually aging.

Usually when we think of changes Associated with old age, we think of functional changes, Things we can actually see in ourselves and in the people around us.

We think of changes even in things like how fast you can run or walk, or your ability to go upstairs, or just how much energy you have.

And then we also think of these in terms of the wrinkles on our face, Graying or loss of hair, and also, to some degree, the diseases that we actually see manifest with aging.

But in reality, these aren't where aging is actually starting.

These are what we would call the emergence or the manifestations of aging.

And we really think aging is starting At a much lower level, so at the molecular and cellular level.

So if I were to ask someone how old they were, Their immediate response is going to be, however many candles they blew out on their last birthday, it's the number on their driver's license.

And really, this number doesn't hold that much meaning, except that it happens to be correlated with this concept of biological aging, which is actually what we really care about.

And what scientists mean by biological age is really the degree to which your biology has changed over a given amount of time.

And we think these changes are gonna be maladaptive.

They're gonna lead to more dysfunction, more decline, and ultimately more disease.

A really important thing in the science of aging is being able to actually quantify or estimate the aging process.

So this is really where we get into this idea of can we measure biological age?

There's three major advantages that scientists have found for trying to quantify or trying to measure the aging process.

So the first one is just understanding the science of aging, Understanding the biology of why systems age, what leads to this, and how to intervene.

The second is it provides an endpoint for any clinical trials or any science that is actually trying to intervene in this process to, to say whether they were actually successful at doing so.

And then probably the third, which most people might care the most about, is it actually gives people an understanding of their overall health and is important for what we call risk stratification.

So understanding who might be more at risk of developing these different age related diseases, and from there, actually either working with a physician or reassessing your lifestyle and behavioral factors, and to figure out if you can actually slow that process and monitor it in real time.

And there isn't one right way to do this.

And you can imagine you can use different types of data to do this.

So some people might actually just use your functional abilities or the number of diseases that you've been diagnosed with as kind of an indices of how much you've changed over time.

Another concept is this idea that we call phenotypic age, which really boils down to kind of how you're changing on a physiological level.

These are things that you would go to your physician for your annual appointment and probably are already getting measured in a blood draw.

So they're capturing things like functioning of different organs, including our liver, kidney.

They capture metabolic health, they capture lipids, and to some degree, they're also capturing things like our inflammation and immune profile.

So when we put these all together, you can actually get an overall number or show on a holistic phenotypic level how you look compared to other people your age.

They give us an idea of how your different organ systems are operating and kind of working together to give you your overall health.

And then there are even more kind of specific ways you can do this on a molecular level or a cellular level where you're really diving into very specific types of variables that we think are where the aging process might actually be starting.

And we think this measure of aging is really important because it captures the physiological changes that we actually think precede the dysfunction that we see arising in disease.

So we actually think that it's predictive of future risk of disease, and it's also close enough or proximal enough to the disease that it's actually going to be able to tell you how you're doing.

So, on average, we would expect most people would gain one year of phenotypic age for every one year of chronological age.

So if you were to measure yourself every year on your birthday, we'd expect it to increase at one year, every year.

However, ideally, what you would actually want to see is that your phenotypic age is increasing at a slower rate than your chronological age.

And we would think of this as a deceleration or a slowing of the aging process.

There's not really a right age or wrong age to start measuring your phenotypic age.

So a lot of people think, well, I'm already too old, or I've already developed a disease, maybe it's not worth it to me.

But we actually find that there's still a lot of malleability in terms of someone's phenotypic aging process throughout the entire lifespan.

So we think that people of any age should actually be monitoring this.

And you're probably already getting these measures when you go visit your doctor on an annual basis.

So it's really easy to kind of put these into the algorithm and get one more variable beyond what your doctor's going to look at.

So typically, when your doctor looks at your lab tests, they're going to tell you if any of these biomarkers are in the kind of at risk or abnormal range.

We think of that as almost like there's high risk and low risk, but there's actually a whole spectrum of how your physiology is behaving.

And there's a lot of information in knowing, even if you haven't passed that high risk threshold, are you close or are you closer to it than we would expect for your age, or how quickly are you approaching it?

So this can give you additional information beyond these traditional risk measures that people look at.

Because of the way phenotypic age or these other biological age measures were actually derived, the average person will have the same biological or phenotypic age as his or her chronological age.

If you looked at a population, you'd expect to see a normal distribution where you find most people are predicted to be the same biological or phenotypic age as they are chronologically.

But we know there's also spread on either side.

And when we look at the average, for instance, United States population, we see that kind of, that standard deviation or how much people kind of vary is around five years.

Granted, you can get extreme outliers, so people who look 10 or maybe even 20 years older or younger than expected for their chronological age, but most people will fall in that kind of or -5 years of their chronological age.

If you have already visited your doctor and you've got an annual blood test, you probably can get your phenotypic age test for free.

So there are online calculators that list the nine biomarkers that you actually need to calculate your phenotypic age.

So all you would need to do is go and find your most recent lab test, input the values, and the algorithm will actually produce a phenotypic age measure for you.

Assuming you are going and getting regular annual physicals with lab tests, this is something you can already do.

If not, you can visit your physician or something like a laboratory that offers a lot of these blood based tests and get these for relatively little money.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The biggest myth about aging, according to science | Morgan Levine: Full Interview

specific

process

figure

resilience