The Four Small Things That Move Your Biological Age

This post is a companion piece to episode 150 of the Beautifully Whole podcast. You can listen to the full episode here if you would rather hear the science in my voice.

My chronological age is 55. My biological age is 47 and a half. I took the test recently, and the number came back like that in writing. Same body, two ages. That gap is what this whole conversation is about. Because your biological age is not a metaphor. It is a real measurement of how old your cells, your organs, your blood, and your systems actually look at the molecular level, and it is one of the most useful pieces of information you can have about yourself in your 50s. And the reason I can tell you that gap exists at all is that I have been doing four specific things for a very long time now, and I want to walk you through them today so you can start doing them too.

This blog is a companion to the 150th episode of my podcast, which is a milestone I do not want to pass without acknowledging. I started The Beautiful Bag in late 2019 for a small group of ostomates who had nowhere to hear their own lives reflected back to them. Six years later, the show is called Beautifully Whole, the audience is much wider, and the conversations have grown into everything I actually think about in a full life at 55. Longevity being at the center of most of it. Thank you for being here for 150 episodes. Now let me give you the science.

What Longevity Actually Means

The word longevity has become a marketing term, which has made a lot of us tune it out. So let me borrow the framing from Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who spoke in Nashville and reset how I think about this. Dr. Patrick is a PhD in biomedical science from the University of Tennessee. She did her graduate research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and her postdoctoral fellowship in nutritional biochemistry. She is not a wellness influencer. She is not affiliated with any company. She built her audience of more than a million followers on the strength of her ability to translate rigorous, peer-reviewed evidence into things regular people can actually use.

Her framing is the one that landed for me. Longevity is not about living forever. It is about extending your health span, which is the number of years in your life that you spend actually being healthy, functioning, moving, and living well. Nobody wants to be 100 and sick. What we all want is to be 80 or 90 or 100 and still ourselves. Still moving. Still thinking. Still here. That is the frame. Now here is the science.

Lever One: Vitamin D

Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin. It is a steroid hormone. It enters the nucleus of your cells, turns your genes on and off, and regulates over 1,000 genes, which is roughly 5 percent of the human genome. Dr. Patrick drew a comparison here that stayed with me. Estrogen is also a steroid hormone. When estrogen drops in menopause, things go wrong. The sweats, the brain fog, the mood shifts, the sleep changes. Vitamin D works the same way. When its levels drop, things go wrong at the cellular level, and most of us do not connect the dots because we are still thinking of it as a vitamin instead of a hormone.

Seventy percent of the US population has insufficient vitamin D levels. Not deficient, insufficient. There is a difference, and the difference matters. Insufficient means your levels are low enough to affect how your body runs, but not low enough that most doctors will flag it in a routine visit. There are real reasons we are so low. Sunscreen blocks the production of vitamin D in the skin. Clothing blocks it. Living in the northern hemisphere means that for months of the year, the UVB rays that trigger vitamin D production do not even reach the atmosphere at our latitude. I am in New Hampshire. The math does not work in my favor for half the year.

Age makes it worse. A 70-year-old makes roughly four times less vitamin D in her skin than her 20-year-old self, even with the same sun exposure. So my protocol is this. I get my blood work done a couple of times a year because I geek out on knowing my numbers. My vitamin D level is on the optimal side. In the summer, I do not typically supplement because I get real sun exposure. I do not wear sunblock every single time I step outside. I let my body make the hormone. My face still gets sunblock because I care about my skin. Come winter, I add a supplement, and I know exactly what dose to take because I have the blood work to base it on.

If you take one thing from this section, take this. Get your vitamin D level tested. Do not guess. If you supplement without knowing where you are starting from, you are throwing money at something you cannot measure. And if your level comes back low, the dose matters. You have to take enough to actually move the number, and you retest after six months to make sure you did.

Lever Two: Omega-3s

Omega-3 is a testable number, not a guess. The measurement is called the Omega-3 Index, and it tells you the actual concentration of omega-3 fatty acids in your red blood cells. Mine is over 8, which is where you want it. Most Americans are sitting well below that target and do not know it.

Here is why the target matters. Higher omega-3 index correlates with lower all-cause mortality. That is real. Better brain health, better cardiovascular health, and lower inflammation across the board. The research on this is enormous, and it is worth reading if you have the time. Fish oil supplementation works. Eating fatty fish works. Both will move the number up. Quality matters, though. If your fish oil makes you burp fish for an hour, it is not high enough quality to keep taking. Spend the extra money on something clean and well-processed.

The comparison Dr. Patrick made that really landed for John and for me was this. If you compare a smoker with high omega-3 levels to a non-smoker with low omega-3 levels, the smoker with high omega-3s comes out ahead on many of the markers that predict long-term health. That is not permission to smoke. Nobody should smoke. But it is a striking way to understand how powerful this one nutrient is at the cellular level. My husband John sat next to me during that talk and turned to me and asked, are you kidding me right now? He is 67. He has been paying attention to this now in a way he never has before. He started taking omega-3s the week we got home.

Lever Three: Magnesium

Magnesium is the most underrated mineral in midlife, and Dr. Patrick called it out as one of the top four longevity levers for a reason. It is involved in more than 300 enzymatic reactions in your body. Sleep. Muscle function. Cardiovascular health. Cognitive function. Sixty percent of your body’s magnesium is stored in your bones. When your diet falls short, your body pulls from that reserve the way you would draw down a retirement account. You drain it slowly and you do not feel it until you really, really feel it.

Magnesium deficiency is widespread and dramatically underdiagnosed because standard blood tests do not catch it well. Most magnesium sits inside your cells, not floating around in your bloodstream. A regular blood panel misses it. Cellular or DNA-based tests through companies like Function Health can catch it if you want to know your true level. And modern diets almost never provide enough, partly because our soil has been depleted of magnesium over the last several decades, so even eating well is not necessarily replenishing what you are using.

There are different forms of magnesium for different purposes. Magnesium glycinate helps with sleep. Magnesium citrate helps with digestion. Some companies make a complex that combines multiple forms so you get support across different systems. I am adding a magnesium complex back into my daily routine starting this week, because I am convinced by the science and because my digestion could use the assist.

A personal note here that I want to share because it might help someone. Eleven years ago I had a full hysterectomy, which put me into surgical menopause overnight. My doctor put me on estrogen right away, and a couple of years ago I added testosterone. About a year ago my sleep started falling apart. I was waking up in the middle of the night and could not stay asleep. I went back to my doctor, and we added progesterone. If you do not have enough progesterone, sleep is one of the first things that suffers. Adding it changed my sleep almost completely. And now I am layering magnesium in on top of that because it works on the same system through a different mechanism. Always talk to your doctor before you add or change anything. I am telling you my story, not prescribing yours.

Lever Four: NAD

NAD is the one I am most excited about, because it is the one where the science is moving fastest. NAD is a cellular energy molecule. It is not energy itself. It is the compound your body needs in order to convert food and oxygen into usable energy at the cell level. Without it, that whole conversion process breaks down. NAD is also required for DNA repair, which is happening in your cells constantly, all day long, every day of your life. Low NAD equals compromised repair, and compromised repair equals accelerated aging.

Here is what most people miss about NAD. It does not just decline because you got older. It declines because inflammation and oxidative stress burn through it faster than your body can produce it. Which is why the other three levers matter so much. Vitamin D, omega-3s, and magnesium all help reduce the systemic inflammation that drains your NAD supply. You cannot supplement your way out of a body that is on fire on the inside. You have to lower the fire first.

This is where I need to share something that most people do not talk about, and I share it because I know I have readers who are cancer survivors. NAD IV drips have become popular at wellness clinics. Most of the time, they work well and cost around five hundred dollars for a session. But I cannot take an NAD IV drip. When I went into an IV clinic once for hydration and some vitamins, the nurses walked me through what I could and could not have. Because of my hereditary cancer risk and my own history, they told me that a direct NAD IV drip is not something I should do. It goes directly into the bloodstream and can influence cellular reproduction in ways that are worth being cautious about when you have my kind of medical history. I have been in remission for more than ten years now. But I stay cautious.

What I can do, and what my doctor has cleared me for, is take an NMN precursor. NMN is a compound your body converts into NAD through its own natural pathway. It is not the same as an IV. It supports your body’s ability to make NAD on its own, over time, without the direct-injection route. That distinction matters, especially if you have any cancer history in your family, so please talk to your own doctor before you add anything in this category. I recently added a new NAD-supporting supplement to my daily routine that is based on early clinical research in this area, and I have noticed a genuine difference in my energy over the last couple of weeks. Not a promise, just my personal experience. The science on NAD and biological age is one of the most active areas of longevity research right now, and there is more to come.

What I Am Actually Taking Every Day

A few people asked after the podcast episode what my actual daily stack looks like. Here is the version that will let you see the whole thing in one place. I put my full longevity system together on one page so you do not have to go hunting for individual products, and everything I take every day lives there.

The link below is an affiliate link to products I personally use. If you purchase through it, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only ever share products I genuinely use and recommend.

You can see the complete longevity system I take daily here: View the full system

Here is what is in it and why I take each piece.

Liquid collagen, daily

I have been drinking Liquid BioCell every day for more than six years. Two tablespoons a day. It tastes like juice. It is a liquid collagen that mimics the structure of human collagen more closely than most powders on the market, which means my body actually knows what to do with it when it hits my system. I take it for my hair, my skin, my nails, and my joints, and I can tell the difference in all four when I skip it.

Customized daily vitamin pack

I take a customized daily vitamin pack that is built to match my body’s specific needs based on a quick health questionnaire. Mine includes the multivitamin foundation, my omega-3s, magnesium, and vitamin D in the doses my body actually needs, plus brain support because I want to protect the years ahead. It ships to my door once a month and it is one of the simpler decisions I have made about my health.

NAD support

The newest addition to my routine is a supplement called Vivix, which supports my body’s own NAD production through an NMN-based pathway. This is the one I said I was most excited about, and it is the one that is giving me the most noticeable energy shift in the shortest amount of time. I have been on it for a couple of weeks. I will keep sharing how it goes.

If you want the full picture of what a longevity-focused daily routine looks like for a woman in her mid-fifties, that is it. Three products. Every day. That is the foundation. The rest is sleep, movement, sunlight, real food, real relationships, and a phone that stays out of the first hour of your day.

One More Thing About Multivitamins

There is a study you should know about called the COSMOS study. It is a landmark, peer-reviewed piece of research that showed daily multivitamin use produced significant cognitive benefit in older adults. That result changed the conversation around multivitamins. For years the narrative was that they are just expensive urine, and to be direct with you, if you are taking a random multivitamin off a drugstore shelf without knowing what your body actually needs, that is not entirely wrong. But when the multivitamin is built around your actual needs, and your body’s ability to absorb nutrients from food declines as it does with age, the evidence has caught up. A well-formulated daily multivitamin matters, especially in the second half of life.

Dr. Patrick’s whole point in Nashville was that we do not need to overhaul our lives. We do not need expensive procedures. We do not need to change everything about our days. We need to pull four levers consistently, and we need to give our cells what they cannot make on their own anymore. That is it. Small daily inputs that compound over decades.

Where This Leaves You

The best time to start doing this work was probably ten years ago. The second best time is right now, this week, this morning. You do not need a longevity clinic. You do not need a full body scan. You need to know your vitamin D level, your omega-3 index, and roughly where your magnesium sits. You need to support your NAD through the pathway that is right for your medical history. And you need to keep going for years, not for a season.

I am 55. My biological age is 47 and a half. That gap did not happen because of a single product or a single decision. It happened because I have been paying attention to these four levers, in one form or another, for most of the last decade. If I had started ten years earlier, that gap would be even wider. If you start today, in ten years yours will look different too.

If You Want to Go Deeper

The full podcast episode goes deeper on every one of these four levers, including some of the specific research studies Dr. Patrick referenced. If you also want the more personal version of what I have been creating this year, the private email community is where I share the pieces of my day and my life that do not make it to the feed.

Join the community here: Beautifully Whole community