We have no idea how old you are

We have no idea how old you are

Can we measure your body's biological age?

Is aging a contained biological process we could put a reliable number to and then treat directly, instead of waiting for it to show up later as heart disease, diabetes, or Alzheimer's?

That's the question Dr. Nir Barzilai has spent three decades chasing. He directs the Institute for Geroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, founded the Longevity Genes Project (which has studied more than 600 centenarians and their kids), and dreamed up TAME, the trial that first got the FDA to treat aging itself as a measurable outcome.

In this new episode from our NextLevel series, he talks about why he thinks centenarians handle illness completely differently than the rest of us, which drugs already sitting in pharmacies might be quietly slowing aging down, and what's still missing before any of this can be proven in a clinic.

How old are you really? →

Five Key Takeaways

1. Centenarians get sick for weeks, not years.

In Barzilai's Longevity Genes Project, nearly a third of centenarians had no diagnosed disease and took no medications at all, evidence that healthy aging compresses illness into the very end of life rather than spreading it across decades.