04/08/2025
What Really Drives Aging—and How We Can Slow It
Ageing isn’t just about wrinkles or birthdays—it’s a process deeply tied to dysfunction in two critical systems: metabolism and the immune system.
Here’s what the latest research reveals:
🔥 Chronic Inflammation (aka "Inflammaging")
Low-grade, persistent inflammation—often driven by senescent cells, damaged mitochondria, and immune dysregulation—is a key accelerator of biological ageing. It's linked to heart disease, cognitive decline, insulin resistance, and more.
⚙️ Metabolic Breakdown
As we age, our cells lose efficiency in managing energy. Mitochondria decline. DNA damage accumulates. Critical co-factors like NAD⁺, essential for energy and repair, start to drop—largely due to rising inflammation and enzymes that destroy it.
🛡️ The Immune-Metabolic Connection
Our immune cells also become metabolically dysfunctional with age. This weakens our defence systems and increases our vulnerability to chronic diseases.
🔧 What Can We Do About It?
Emerging interventions are promising:
✅ Nutritional strategies like time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting, and ketogenic diets elevate NAD⁺ levels, activate cellular repair pathways, and reduce inflammation.
✅ Exercise, stress reduction, and sleep continue to be foundational tools that modulate both immunity and metabolism.
✅ Supplements and compounds such as NAD⁺ precursors (NMN, NR), senolytics, metformin, and rapamycin are under investigation for their potential to reverse or slow hallmarks of aging.
🧪 Biological Clocks
New tools go beyond your birth certificate: lipid, proteomic, immune, and DNA methylation clocks can now estimate your biological age—and track how your interventions are working.
---
The future of longevity lies in understanding and modulating the immune-metabolic axis. Ageing may be inevitable—but how fast it happens and how well we function is more in our control than ever before.
🧠 Want to age well? Start by thinking metabolically and immunologically.