Niamh Shackleton
A biologist has revealed a straightforward way to make yourself biologically younger.
People pay stacks of cash in a bid to try fight the aging process; the best example being Bryan Johnson, who forks out as much as $2 million a year.
Johnson has gone to some extreme methods to feel and look younger, including getting a plasma infusion from his teenage son.
The 47-year-old has also has undergone medical procedures to achieve his goals, one of which involved him having his joints injected with 300 million stem cells.
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I'm not sure about you guys, but I'm terribly squeamish and don't have a spare $2 million to splurge, so won't be embarking on such anti-aging techniques any time soon.
But you'll be pleased to know that there's supposedly a much cheaper and easier way to reverse the aging process, with one study suggesting that it can turn back your biological clock as far as 2.5 years, as per Medical News Today.
It simply involves a lifestyle change that would see you fast for a period of time.
While it's advised that you should not go without eating for long periods of time, short-term fasting could make all the difference to your body.
According to Dr Valter Longo, a three-day fast prompts cells to begin 'eating themselves' which is an 'opportunity to get rid of a lot of normal components, but junk, real junk that accumulated in the cell'.
"It's an opportunity to clean up," he further explained on to Professor Tim Spector on the ZOE Science & Nutrition podcast.
In regards to anti-aging, it's a five-day 'fasting-like' diet that you should be looking to do.
Known as the fasting-mimicking diet (FMD), Healthline explains that this involves five-day cycles of a diet low in overall calories, protein and carbohydrates; and high in unsaturated fats, such as the kind found in olive oil, nuts and seeds.
The diet was developed by Dr Longo. He said in a news release last year: "This is the first study to show that a food-based intervention that does not require chronic dietary or other lifestyle changes can make people biologically younger, based on both changes in risk factors for aging and disease and on a validated method developed by the [Morgan E. Levine] group to assess biological age."
In the study that was published in 2024, the participants who 'had signs of a more youthful immune system and a reduced biological age' practiced FMD for five days each month, and started to see the positive affects it was having after three months.