Commusings: A Science-Based Method for Turning Back Your Biological Clock by Dr. Kara Fitzgerald

Hello Commune Community,

Last night, I performed my first ever piano gig. My palms might have been sweaty if it hadn’t been as frigid as a witch’s tit (one of Schuyler’s colorful metaphors). But I did a little box breathing back-of-house and arrived on stage without any nerves. I sat at my old, rickety, 1970s Wurlitzer piano and beheld the keys. There they were, exactly as I left them. I ran my fingers up a chromatic scale starting on A and ending on G#. The notes never change, but I do. At times, I am relaxed, open and dexterous and, at other times, I am stiff, closed and clunky.

The piano player is the epigenome — he or she who sits above the keys and influences their expression. My DNA is like the 88 keys on a piano. It’s the hand I’ve been dealt, warts and all. But what keys will I “turn on?” And will they produce clusters of harmonious and epiphanous tones or will they drive people from the club in their dissonance? 

Yes, our DNA predisposes us to certain conditions — on occasion, definitively. But, as it pertains to chronic disease, the era of genetic determinism is withering. Epigenetics, the expression of our genes in relation to our environment, has now taken center stage. Our genes are expressed like a piece of music, and this expression can be adaptive or maladaptive. For example, tumor suppressor genes can turn on in response to specific nutrients. A well-rested, destressed, properly-fed pianist will leverage the keys at his disposal for beauty and coherence. The same is true of our bodies. 

Today’s essayist, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, is at the tip of the spear in the emerging field of epigenetics. Her research on “epi-nutrition” is demonstrating astounding results. I follow her assiduously and I encourage you to do so as well. I also invite you to watch her new Commune course, The Younger You Method, free for five days.  

Here at [email protected] and tinkling the ivories on IG @jeffkrasno.
 
In love, include me,
Jeff

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A Science-Based Method for Turning Back Your Biological Clock by Dr. Kara Fitzgerald

It’s true that getting older is inevitable: no amount of wizardry can change how many years old you are. Although we all age with time, we don’t all age equally. Aging is a complex process influenced by many factors, and even though two people can have the same chronological age, their life expectancy and living quality can be vastly different. That’s because, in addition to your chronological age, which can only move in one direction, you also have a biological age—or, as I like to call it, your bio age. And your bio age can move in reverse. 

Bio age is based on the premise that our bodies are constantly subject to damage and degradation from internal and external sources. By assessing how much damage has accumulated in your body, your bio age shows how old your tissues, systems, and even your genetic material are. In other words, you could be fifty chronologically but have the same amount of damage to your body as a typical fifty-eight-year-old. With the Younger You method (as explained in my new Commune course), you could be fifty but repair your overall level of damage to that of someone in their forties. It’s like turning back time. 

While there have been various tools for assessing bio age for a while now, the accuracy of these tools has been mediocre at best. But recently, science has taken a massive leap forward in this arena. We can now measure bio age with exquisite accuracy by assessing how your genes are expressed in a revolutionary field of study known as epigenetics. “Epi” means “above;” epigenetics refers to the biological markers that sit on top of your genetic material and dictate which genes are turned on and which are turned off. To use a computing analogy, your DNA is the hardware—it is what it is. It can be damaged, and it can be repaired, but without software, it can’t do much. So, what’s the software? That is epigenetics. 

So far, just a handful of human studies have shown that bio age can move in reverse. This is an extraordinary achievement, but most of these studies have relied on medications, and/or have taken a long time, and/or were measuring a population that started less than healthy (less healthy individuals tend to be older biologically and can therefore get younger simply by returning to health). 

My pilot study is the first to show that significant age reversal might be brought about in healthy individuals through doable diet and lifestyle changes alone, and accomplished in a matter of weeks. No magic potions required. Just tweaking your normal lifestyle: food, sleep, exercise, and relaxation, but nothing too far beyond what most folks consider to be basic self-care. 

REDUCING BIO AGE WITH DIET AND LIFESTYLE 
Beyond our study participants, every one of the hundreds and hundreds of patients who have come through the doors of my clinic in the past several years have either been given, as their primary intervention, the eight-week eating plan and lifestyle prescription that our study participants followed, known as the Younger You Intensive, or been coached to incorporate some of these foods and practices—a less intensive, longer-term version known as Younger You Everyday.

At my clinic, we see patients with chronic conditions who have tried other medical avenues to limited success. They are often complex cases that represent a broad swath of the illnesses that are so common today— autoimmune diseases, chronic allergies, autism, digestive issues, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, infertility, cancer, Lyme disease, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and dementia. These are folks who have struggled with a conventional medicine model because their medical realities don’t necessarily fit clinical definitions, and if there are prescribed treatments, their side effects chip away at quality of life.

Regardless of their official diagnosis, the majority of our clinic patients are at some phase of midlife, and they also want to look and feel younger. That desire is often what gets them to book their first appointment. Yet the results my patients have experienced in search of reducing their biological age are extraordinary. We have seen their chronic, difficult-to-manage symptoms lessen, stabilize, or even go away completely.

For example, I recently started working with a woman who was dealing with a full-blown case of seasonal allergies. Ava had completely lost her sense of smell, her body was covered in hives, and every year she developed a sinus infection so severe that it required antibiotics and steroids. In our first meeting, she was much more interested in developing a plan that would help reverse the signs of aging—the thickening middle, the brain fog, the loss of muscle tone—than she was in addressing her allergies. But by following the Younger You diet and lifestyle principles, she lost weight, regained her ability to think clearly, built muscle, and her seasonal allergies fully resolved.

Ava’s certainly not the only one. It’s so exciting to me that as we get further into what’s known as the “omics revolution”—the line of study that looks at individual components of physiology such as the genome (your actual DNA), the epigenome (the material that sits on top of your genetic code and dictates which genes are turned up and which are switched off), the microbiome (the microbial population in your gut), and more, and how they interact with each other—we see that humble interventions such as nutrition, sleep, and exercise might be the most impactful and essential tools we have to improve individual health. It’s a massive paradox that it took science reaching this level of sophistication to realize the power of these fundamental interventions, but it’s so validating to me, a holistic physician/lab geek, to see just how exquisitely programmed for wellness we are, if we only understand how to nourish and take care of ourselves. 

THE ULTIMATE GOAL: A LONGER, HEALTHIER LIFE 
Our understanding of how to reduce our bio age is occurring just in the nick of time. Since peaking in 2014, life expectancy growth in the USA has stalled and even declined¹. And that’s before the more dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that roared across the globe; life expectancy fell more than 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021 due to the impact of COVID-19, a decline not seen since 1921-1923.² It’s not just that we’re living a shorter time; it’s also that we’re spending a longer portion of the time we’re alive with a serious disease that is a leading cause of death—according to information from the World Health Organization, we spend 20 percent (or an average of 16.2 years) of our lives sick.^3,4 (In his incredible book Being Mortal, Atul Gawande included two graphs: one that showed the trajectory of a life before modern medicine, with limited years of health and then a fairly sharp decline that ended in death . .

. . . and the common path of life we have now that we have learned how to survive, but not necessarily abate, disease. It shows a long, slow, gradual, and honestly, painful decline in quality of life.

Our study and clinical work suggests a third option: that by supporting our epigenetics via diet and lifestyle, we might have the possibility of a new trajectory, one that combines the more consistent quality of life of the first graph above and the overall length of life of the second graph.  Let’s put an end to the sixteen-plus years of ill health we’re all currently destined to endure and turn them back into years of thriving and wellness!

This third option isn’t a new idea—it was first put forth by James Fries, a professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine who published a paper on his “compression of morbidity” thesis in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. In it, Fries wrote, “Chronic illness may presumably be postponed by changes in life style, and it has been shown that the physiologic and psychologic markers of aging may be modified. . .  These considerations suggest a radically different view of the life span and of society, in which life is physically, emotionally and intellectually vigorous until shortly before its close.”⁵

The Younger You method aims to postpone chronic illness—and the associated prescription drugs, surgical procedures, and poor quality of life—and improve the physiological markers of aging that Fries referenced. It uses nutrient-rich food and time-tested lifestyle practices to empower the innate and timeless healing systems encoded within your body to slow down and even prevent chronic illness and alter the “aging” trajectory. By following it, you’ll be influencing your epigenome and genetic expression. No matter your family history, current health status, age, or weight, you can get on a path to raising your level of health, reducing your biological age, and extending your health span—maybe even your life span.
 

This is an excerpt from YOUNGER YOU by Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, courtesy of Hachette Book Group. Learn more about the book here.

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Kara Fitzgerald, ND, IFMCP, is a leader in functional medicine, longevity, and epigenetics and is the first-ever recipient of the Emerging Leadership Award from the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute for her work on DNA methylation. She received her doctorate from National University of Natural Medicine and is on the faculty at the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM). She is also an IFM Certified Practitioner with a clinical practice in Newtown, Connecticut.

 

1. S. H. Woolf and H. Schoomaker, “Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates in the United States, 1959–2017,” JAMA 322, no. 20 (2019):1996–2016, doi: 10.1001 /jama.2019.16932.
2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Life Expectancy in the U.S. Dropped for the Second Year in a Row in 2021. August 31, 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220831.htm
3. World Health Organization, “Top 10 Causes of Death,” May 24, 2018, www .who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death.
4. Tim Peterson, “Healthspan Is More Important Than Lifespan, So Why Don’t More People Know About It?,” May 30, 2017, https://publichealth.wustl.edu /heatlhspan-is-more-important-than-lifespan-so-why-dont-more-people-know-about -it/.
5. J. F. Fries, “Aging, Natural Death, and the Compression of Morbidity,” New England Journal of Medicine 303, no. 3 (July 17, 1980):130–135, doi: 10.1056/ NEJM198007173030304.