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It feels like everyone is obsessed with turning back the clock lately, whether that means booking a botox appointment, leveling up your supplement game, or going full throttle on all kinds of fancy longevity treatments. And thanks to a growing body of research, we now know that it is possible to hack your health and slow down the pace of cellular aging (a.k.a. biological aging) to a certain extent.
But while the rate at which we aging has always been attributed to the unique combination of genetics, lifestyle factors, and your environment, a new scientific study suggests it might not be that complicated—and your genes might actually be the least important factor.
That’s great news if certain illnesses run in your family (disease can be a major component in cellular aging). It also means that you might have more control over aging than you think. Here’s what the study found, plus the factors that seem to matter more in cellular aging than others.
Meet the experts: M. Austin Argentieri, PhD, lead study author and a research associate at the Harvard/MGH Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations, and Health Disparities; Cornelia van Duijn, PhD, study co-author and professor at the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Population Health; Alfred F. Tallia, MD, MPH, professor and chair of family medicine and community health at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
What did the study find?
The study, which was published in Nature Medicine, looked at data from about half a million people who participated in the UK Biobank, a biomedical database that contains genetic, health, and lifestyle information.
Using that data, researchers analyzed the influence of nearly 165 environmental elements and genetic risk factors across 22 major age-related diseases and incidences of premature death.
There were a lot of different findings, but the most striking was that the factors related to lifestyle and a person’s environment played a bigger role in biological aging than their genetics did.
“Environmental factors explained 17 percent of the variation in risk of death, compared to less than 2 percent explained by genetic predisposition,” says Cornelia van Duijn, PhD, study co-author and professor at the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Population Health.
What kind of environmental factors contribute to aging?
Environmental factors include the things that surround you in your day-to-day life that can influence your health, like the amount of air pollution you’re exposed to or where you live. The researchers found that the following environmental factors had the biggest influence on aging: