Crypto News: What’s my (biological) age again?

Hi all, it's Emma in New York. Lately I've had the song "Forever Young" stuck in my head. I'll explain more in a minute. But first...

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I was feeling pretty smug when my colleagues Fiona Rutherford, Madison Muller and I were invited by the startup Tally Health to take the company's "biological age" test. The saliva-based test, which costs $230 on Tally's website, claims to tell you whether you're aging well — or poorly.

I thought that this was a test I would ace. I've always exercised regularly, eaten a lot of vegetables and prioritized my eight hours of sleep. I just got a standing desk! My body must be on the younger side … right?

Then I got my results back. It turned out that my biological age (30 years and 10 months) was actually older than my actual age (29). That's almost two whole years older.

Tally Health was co-founded by the Harvard scientist David Sinclair in 2021, but biological age tests have been around for about a decade. The researcher Steve Horvath was an early pioneer, and realized that chemical markers on our DNA correlated with a person's age. It became known as Horvath's Clock. Scientists then built on the concept to develop tests that measure people's health more generally.

There have been other approaches to measuring biological age, but this one relies on epigenetics, or how things like lifestyle and environment shape the expression of a person's genes. It's normal for your epigenetics to change as you age, but behavior and environment can also contribute.

Tally's test uses a machine learning model that was trained to reflect factors like sleep quality, stress levels, alcohol consumption and body-mass index. Your biological age is also supposed to reflect more subjective factors like how healthy you feel and social satisfaction.

The idea behind tests like these is to inspire people to make changes that may contribute to living longer, healthier lives. But critics of the direct-to-consumer tests, including Horvath, question the usefulness of such tests for the average person as there is no real medical intervention to slow aging.

Tally is among a crop of companies including Modern Age and Elysium that sell blood and saliva-based biological age tests. Tally also offers a $130-a-year membership that covers four tests, a daily longevity supplement and personalized recommendations to help improve your test results.

Again, this is supposed to help motivate people to make healthy changes. But as someone who leads a pretty healthy lifestyle already, I felt disheartened.

"Am I going to die young?" I semi-seriously asked Adiv Johnson, Tally's director of research and innovation.

"I definitely would not interpret the results that way," he said.

It turns out that my results are within the margin of error for Tally's test, around one to two years. Most people, in fact, test within a few years of their chronological age.

And at the end of the day, no test can predict the future.

So I'm going to take those results with a grain of salt. And, yes, maybe hit the bike a little harder. — Emma Court

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Ask us anything — well, anything health-related that is! Each week we're picking a reader question and putting it to our network of experts. So get in touch via AskPrognosis@bloomberg.net.