How to Reverse Aging with Nikolina Lauc of GlycanAge

Hello, longevity friends. I'm your host, Claudia von Boeselager, and welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast, where I invite pioneers and thought leaders in all things longevity and lifestyle to give you the strategies, tools, and practices to live better and reach your highest potential. Today's guest is from my Instagram Live deep dive conversation with a seasoned guest, GlycanAge CEO and co-founder, Nikolina Lauck. If you want to optimize your health for longer, the foundation is testing to know where you are, however good or bad, in order to have a baseline to improve from there. One of the best ways I've found is by measuring your biological age through GlycanAge and then tweaking lifestyle interventions to improve your health, well-being, and all-round life from there. In this episode, we dig into what is personalized biological age testing, what are glycans, why we want to know our biological age, what can influence it, what are good and not so good influences on biological age, what makes glycan age unique as an aging marker, details on how the testing process works, and much more. Also for you, dear audience, I've created a freebie with my 10 Hacks to Improve Your Life and Longevity Playbook. Just go to longevity-and-lifestyle.com and sign up to get your free copy of my playbook. Please enjoy.

So why don't we kick off in time? So, um, Nina, can you give a brief introduction to who you are and what is GlycanAge and what you do? Sure.

So my name is Nina and I'm CEO of a biotech company that's a spin-out out of a research lab.

Lab.

So we're not a traditional company in the way that we have over 3 decades of research behind us and a data set of about 150,000 people followed through time. And we built this aging clock on top of it, which is based on the human glycan, which is also very new. Um, but I can tell you about it today.

Really exciting. So what exactly is personalized biological age testing? What are glycans? And why do we even want to know our biological age?

Well, that— so to start with, also, so one of the founders of this lab is my father, and he told me 11 years ago, I can measure biological aging. And 11 years ago, I didn't get it and I didn't care. I was like, why do you need— and it felt superficial. So my first reaction was, oh, this is superficial. It didn't seem I didn't understand it from the perspective of health, but then if we understand aging from the perspective of health, and if we look at it as the start of decline, that's the inflection point for all the disease that comes later on. And if we tackle aging before it turns into disease, then we're doing preventive health. So if you're thinking about health, if you think about your future health, then you should be thinking about aging. And that's when it clicked. And also the science is super exciting, but the first thing we need to connect, we need to connect our aging not to visual, not to aesthetics, but to what's happening internally and our health longevity in a way.

Yeah, and I think it's that increasing the health span, right? I think, you know, when I talk to people about longevity, there's kind of like, I don't want to be, you know, an old wrinkled-up person longer on my sofa. It's actually about getting, you know, being preventative like you were saying and getting into the healthiest place possible and keeping that for a long time. So what are factors that influence biological age. Can you talk about that?

So for us, we know the aging mechanism. So when we look at the glycans and glycan age, we're looking at your immune system. And through time, you accumulate this low-grade chronic inflammation. So it's inflammaging. And that goes across many different things. So that's from diet to hormone health to weight— well, weight loss, weight gain. So things which we research first were weight loss, caloric restriction, because caloric restriction was one of the first things that extended lifespan in animal models. So we did a weight loss study where they did a diet, bariatric surgery, which we don't endorse, but it's nice validation that weight loss works. And we followed 2,000 twins through 20 years. We saw that the people who are gaining weight age faster, the people who are losing weight age slower. So it's really important to be a healthy weight, and that's very different person to person, and you shouldn't be underweight either. But caloric restriction is an obvious one. Problem is we don't want to be hungry. Nobody, nobody enjoys being hungry. So we looked at different diets. So we looked at 1,000 people in 5 different diets, and the outcome was even if you're on a high, a high carb or high protein, low carb, the chance is 50/50 it's going to work for you. So for 50% of people, they're going to get younger, 50% of people are going to get older. So what's really important is to find the right diet for you. And this is where lichen age is really interesting because about 30 to 70% of these lichens are, they're influenced by genes. So there is a, the heritability is around 50% as an average. And then that combines with your current behavior and environment and put those things together. So when you're looking at something, you're looking at how is this influencing me, and then finding the right intervention. And even if we look at sports or different interventions, it has to be personalized to the individuals, to an individual. Otherwise, no general health— very few general health advice is actually meaningful for you.

So I really like that. So you're saying approximately 50% is lifestyle and environment, so 50% is genes. You can't— you can only, you know, do limited amount there, but 50% basically you can do in terms of lifestyle interventions, as you call them, right? And so there are different biomarkers out there. Can you talk about that and what makes GlycanAge so unique?

The first aging biomarkers which were trialed as a biological aging clock were telomeres, but over the last 2-3 decades of research, they were invalidated because they would first they would fluctuate a lot as an aging clock, so you wouldn't get a reliable measurement. There was a big part which was heritable, and then also there was a very small percentage you can explain. So you were not really sure why people had longer or shorter telomeres, and they were not really predictably changeable with intervention. So they're not really used in practice anymore. We published on the 10th of December 2013, which is the same date that Steve Horvath published the methylation clock. But a lot more—

Great minds think alike, as they say, right?

Very different technologies, but a lot more people looked at methylation because you can do methylation in many different labs. And you can look at glycans in only a couple labs in the world. But over the last decade, we had more successful trials in terms of intervention trials than methylation. And the biggest problem with methylation is that it's very accurate to chronological age. So you're only a couple years up or down of your chronological age. And if you want to explain it, you can just look at the age of a person and you know your age. While with glycans, they're very stable if you remeasure them. So you can get a very stable repeat result. But then if you intervene and you have a response in the person, you can shift it by a decade within a number of months. So they're a stable and changeable aging clock. And we understand the mechanism. For methylation, it's still information. Nobody understands what's what's driving the clock. And we know that the mechanism is chronic inflammation. And we know that the same chronic inflammation is involved in the majority of age-related diseases, not all of them, but the majority of them.

So what are some of the benefits? Let's talk about that for consumers, right? Because some people think this is just something you can do at the doctor's office. But, you know, can you explain what the benefits are and why this is really for everybody? Male, female, no matter what age you are, why is this such an amazing product and service that you offer?

We can control our aging process. So it's something we all care about it, but it's something moldable now. And that's our future health. So we can control it now. The problem with medicine, medicine as it is now, if you go to your doctor, they can't help you until you are severely ill. So you have to be, otherwise you're the worried well. So if you care about your health and we check the hypochondriacs, yeah, yeah, more regular checkups on their cars than we do on ourselves, and that's just insane. So that needs to flip over, and you don't have this yet on the NHS. It's going to be a long process until we get there. But you have it as, uh, you can buy it as a consumer. You can go to our functional medicine practitioners and use it to guide your interventions and personalize them and also find out where you are, because you may be doing all the right things but you don't really have proof that they're working. So it's a nice way to see that they are actually, or you may be doing mistakes. A lot of people do a lot for their health and they actually overdo it. And you need this early feedback to know if you're overdoing it. Another, it's motivational. So if you know you're doing all the wrong things, then it's an early wake-up call. So it tells you now, 20 years before something goes wrong, or 10 years before something goes wrong, you should be changing your lifestyle and your behavior. And that's very motivating. Actually, when clients get higher biological age, they're— it's like a personal insult. They're highly motivated to change. So we have very good success in reducing the scores because they come back, they lost a lot of weight, they did all these changes because they got the news in time. We didn't wait until disease. You got it before it happens.

So can you break down exactly what that process looks like? You know, can you— how does— from A to B. So someone says, okay, I want to find out my biological age. What do I need to do? How do I order it? Do I need a doctor? How does the whole process work?

It's very simple now. So you can go, we have it as an e-commerce site. So you can go online, buy a box. And then doing the test is also really simple. That took a while. It took us about 3 years to get to a stage where you can do it from 4 drops or like dry blood stains instead of having to go to a clinic, draw blood, and then separate plasma, put it in dry ice, ship it to a lab. That was very complicated.

A little bit more complicated. So now it's super simple. So it's a skin prick test with 4 drops of blood on a piece of paper. Is that right?

Yeah, so you get these, there's about 4 lancets and some alcohol wipes and plasters for later. And then you have a card and you need about 4 drops of blood. So it's not a lot. It needs to be a good drop, so don't touch the paper because you can contaminate. Wait until it's to fall. And pretty much every drop of blood, they're go from age 21 to 94. So if they can do it, I'm pretty sure—

94, wow, that's impressive. Very cool. And so it gets shipped off then. So you put the, the blood dries on the, the paper and then you ship it off to the lab. What happens then?

When it reaches the lab, we fish out IgG, which is an antibody, and it's the most prevalent antibody in blood. Because of COVID we all know what antibodies are. So it's the adaptive immune system. Yeah, your immune system through life. And it's the slower part of the immune system, so it doesn't change so quickly. And then we cut off the glycans on your IgG and we look at the composition. And you would have— we label them as good or bad, or pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory structures. And this changes with age. So the composition would naturally change. So all of us have a level of this chronic inflammation as we age, but it's something moldable. So you can influence it with your behavior. If you're doing it as a consumer, it's mainly lifestyle intervention focused. So it's, in a way, you'll get personalized guidance from us because every test comes with a specialist consultation. But the implementation is based on you. And also in functional medicine, the same thing, you have to go and do the work. And you can go to clinicians. So we work with quite a few menopause clinics, and there the intervention is a therapy. So there are, you can influence it with therapies as well, and that's something we can't do as a company, but you can go to your doctor and then combine the two things.

So let's talk about some of the cases that you see, or what have been some of the biggest surprises for consumers when they get the results back and they speak to this health coach that, as part of GlycanAge, you know, what are some of the surprises? Is it just purely, you know, food-related? What are the different drivers of biological age, and what are some of the most common recommendations the health coaches give?

If you're looking at non-menopause-related, because menopause is a big surprise, but let's start With non-menopause, doing the wrong thing. So you have a lot of people who are super healthy, well, doing all these things for their health, but they're doing too much. So one example is athletes. We thought that athletes would be much younger. We even did a big study of people going to the gym, and actually over-exercise can create chronic inflammation and damage your health. Which is not commonly known. Exercise at the right amount with the right type of nutritional support is good because it's like a natural shock to our body to fix ourselves. So to build new tissue, new muscle, which is younger, which is healthier, that's great. But if we do too much of this damage and we don't allow it to repair, or we don't feed the repair, then actually we do the reverse and we create inflammation. So we were very shocked. We had the study of women's bodybuilding where all of them became much, much older and pro-inflammatory, and they lost bone density. All of their— we looked at gene expression, so all of the, the whole immune system gets dysregulated, and they lose their cycle. So if you're looking at aging, this is menopause and it's osteopenia, and this is young women over-exercising. So you can over-exercise, and hence a lot of athletes actually do damage and they have much shorter careers than you would in different industries. So you can, there is a cost to overdoing. And if you're an athlete, you're very well paid to wreck your body. It's great. You know, you get to pay that.

That's one way of seeing it, I guess, right?

If you're an average person who just wants to be healthy, who's spending 2 hours in the gym and not properly feeding that repair or, or accumulating the damage, then you have no benefit. Maybe visual, but it's actually not good for your health. So that was—

But how do you know when you're over-exercising, let's say? I mean, obviously everybody's a little bit different, but you know, is there a rule of thumb that people can know that they're overkilling themselves, basically?

Probably glycans, so that's a big part of our research. But one general rule that we know doesn't work is being on a caloric— so being on a caloric restriction diet on its own is beneficial. Exercising on its own, we did spin training, was beneficial. A group of young men in this case got younger. But if you combine the two things, so if you restrict your calories and exercise at the same time, then you do the reverse. You create chronic inflammation and your biological age goes up. And that we call it energy insufficiency. So you are creating new muscle but you're not feeding it, so you're not eating enough and you're not recovering enough, and then you get the reverse effect. So we know that that as a general rule doesn't seem to be good. But of course it's very different, so it has to be still personalized. You, you can have— you can be a good athlete with good training aids, so you can tolerate a lot more. Or you maybe have been exercising your whole life, so you can tolerate a lot more. Age is a factor as well. When you're young, you recover much quicker. As you get into your 40s, going to 60s, they— in a recent study, the recovery time was 2 weeks from intense exercise. So there's many factors that would influence it. It has to be personalized.

And I wonder if, you know, it depends on the recovery almost as well, right? So say you were a professional athlete or you were, you know, training for something like a marathon Are there certain interventions or mechanisms you can do to improve recovery so it's not so harsh on the body?

Yes. In case studies, we don't have like a properly designed trial looking at cold therapy or any of the new recovery therapies, but we've seen individuals, so athletes who are also biohackers, they can have phenomenally good results if they're doing the right things. So they have none of the damage we would usually see. So, and you do see this in the athletes who have very good longevity. They really sacrifice a lot to get there. They would not drink, they would sleep 12 hours, they would have an immaculate diet and have all kinds of recovery. So you have to balance those two things out. The whole, the old theory of calories in, calories out doesn't work. You can't eat a rubbish diet and then sweat it out in the gym. That's old news. It doesn't apply anymore. Well, it was never true.

Exactly. It's about the quality as well. And obviously we'd love to open up for questions. So if anyone has any questions, feel free to leave it in here. We'll try to get to as many as possible. But I also wanted to touch on— I saw that a new study just came out that you guys did. Can you talk a bit about the study, particularly for women and women's health?

We always saw that men and women age differently. So men were very straightforward. They just accumulate the bad in a straight line going up and lose the good straight line going down. And then women had the curve. So in a way, they were protected against chronic inflammation in reproductive age. And then as they get closer to menopause, they would have this accelerated biological aging. Now, we didn't know if this was menopause. We just saw that it happened from the age started from the age of 45, between 55, and then they would stabilize. So we assume this, that this is driven by menopause. Recently we had a study where we had the menopause data, so we can see actually what's going on. And the, the reason for starting this study was actually our commercial customers, because we went to the market maybe about 2 years ago now, and we kept getting clients, because our biggest cohort is 40s to 60s. So we kept getting these super healthy women who are not doing anything wrong, and they had very accelerated aging. And we would ask them, are you in menopause? Or— and, and they would say, no, I still have my cycle, it's regular. So we would—

you were like, what's going on?

And then we learned that you don't actually diagnose menopause. You diagnose it retrospectively. So you wait all the years in perimenopause, which can be up to a decade, and then you have to wait a year, not having a cycle for a whole year plus one day, and then officially you're allowed to be in menopause.

One year and one day. That's hilarious.

Yes.

So that's some very modern way of testing. Yeah.

And that's a problem because a lot of the symptoms of perimenopause, which can last up to a decade, there's up to 40 different symptoms and there are many different things. So from anxiety, depression, joint pains, heart palpitations, often the women are misdiagnosed. So you would have all these symptoms over decades and you get a diagnosis with fibromyalgia or depression. Most of them are put on antidepressants and you don't know that this is related to your hormones because you can't run a simple test. So now a big part of our research is seeing if we can use this as a diagnostic for perimenopause, because we see this in every woman, and then the response to therapy. So can we personalize and optimize the therapy so you get the long-term health benefits? And then also understanding the mechanism, not just that menopause is an aging event that we all go through, but it's a health risk. It's a hormone deficiency. It impacts all of our systems. And if we address it as a health risk, then we are looking at it from the long-term health perspective, not just the symptoms as well.

And I think this is such an exciting space to aging as a disease is such that it is optional, that there's so much we can do around it. And obviously it's starting with biological age testing. So it's, you know, getting that baseline. Where are you right now? What's going well? What needs to be tweaked? And then retesting, right? After like, and at what, How many intervals do you recommend people to test and then retest?

Depends what you're doing. If you're just following your age, you can test annually. So if you're not doing any big lifestyle change, you can just monitor it as an age metrics and test around your birthday. We even have plans where you can select to get tested around your birthday, which is when most of us think about it.

Yeah, I guess it depends on the result though, if you want to know on your birthday if you're doing better or worse.

Well, if you've done it the year before, then you're prepared. And if you're doing something, you will see that quick. So there's other— you can depend on the intervention. But if you're doing a dietary intervention, which is not stressful, so you're not exercising and dieting at the same time, then within 3 months you can see a very nice positive shift. If it's weight loss, we say wait up to 6 months. 3 months because it takes a little while for you. It is stress on the body as well. So wait a little, give yourself time. Don't, don't be upset if after 3 months you get the same results. So we say wait 6 months. If it's exercise, so if you're an athlete and you're optimizing performance, then you would want to do it every 3 months and measure the inflammation going up and down. And you would see it go up as you compete and you'll see it go down as you recover. And any other therapies, supplements, we don't yet know, but the recommendation is not less than 2 to 3 months because glycans have a half-life, meaning it takes at least 21 days to see half of a change. So it takes a bit longer for you to see an impact.

That makes sense as well. I want to talk about, for women, some of the interventions you were talking about in terms of if sort of from the age of let's say 35 or what age, I guess I'll ask you, should women start being very aware that they could be going into perimenopause and how much aging actually happens from that and what can actually be done?

It's very individual. So the biggest problem, well, first the problem is that we call it menopause because menopause is the end. Hormone deficiency, and that hormone deficiency can start a decade before. And the problem is there's such a taboo about it that you sometimes don't want to accept that, yes, these hormones are declining in my late 30s or early 40s.

Yeah, I want to feel like you're still 20 forever, right?

Yeah, so around early 40s, and that's— so in the NHS, you would say 45 to 55 is, is the span, but But 1 in 100 women have menopause before the age of 40 and 1 in 1,000 before the age of 30. So it can be very young. You could be.

And even from when the hormones start declining, right? I mean, I know when women have kids or whatever as well, there's that typical baby brain, right? So the brain fog, et cetera, and it's kind of just written off. But, you know, how do you get back to that optimal health and cognition and get rid of that baby brain by checking the hormones? So by doing the biological age testing, it would allow you to realize, okay, there is something going on and to look at hormone replacement therapy. Is that something that you see?

It's not something that we recommend yet because we don't know. We do know we don't recommend testing in pregnancy or even a couple years post-pregnancy, because in pregnancy, because of the high hormone levels, you'll have a better score. So estrogen is an anti-inflammatory. You'll naturally have a much younger result, particularly in the third trimester. And then post-pregnancy, it all goes in the opposite direction for the majority.

I've had two kids, I know, and the lack of sleep and everything else that goes with it. Yeah.

And that's all of that together. And that's Some don't have as much of a dramatic change, but we see in case studies you can age up to a year post-birth, and it takes a year or two for you to recover. And that's hormones, probably sleep, so many different things which are impacting it. So we say at that point, probably don't test and don't worry unless you're very curious about how you want this information. But it's your body trying to get used to to first go back to the shape it was and then also get used to all the changes. But then a couple years post, if all of that is still a problem, then yes, maybe there should be some type of intervention that would help you.

Really exciting. And so what are some developments happening over at GlycanAge, Nina, that, that you want to share? Um, maybe you can talk a bit about that.

Well, it's mainly perimenopause now, so we want to crack that and see if we can find a diagnostic because the majority of women are misprescribed. Over 66% of UK are just given antidepressants for the symptoms. So if we can find the cause correctly, that would be great. And women's health in general. So we do— we've never looked at fertility before. That's a big question mark. So we are looking for just research-based different cohorts to understand how it correlates. And we do know that with conditions like PCOS, the pro-inflammatory glycans would be responsive to testosterone. So testosterone in women would drive these pro-inflammatory structures. And after that, well, sports as well, in parallel. So we have a lot of research projects going. So in sports, we want to see if we can predict injury, and that's going to take time until we get there. But we have lots of experience with their clients when they have highly elevated glycan age and chronic inflammation, a couple months later they have an injury. So we want to see scientifically now, can we prove this out? And then can we use this as a metric to predict injury and hopefully extend athletes' career time? Because that would mean a lot for them. I think that and diet. So that microbiome is one big area of research. We're looking at different interventions that improve the gut microbiome because it's a very symbiotic relationship. So we know that if you— and we know this from clinical trials which were fecal microbiome transplants. So it's not something we recommend to consumers, but you can just increase the diversity of plants in your diet and improve your gut. That's like a general rule. If you eat 30 different plants a week and we see even in individual case studies, they've reduced quite significantly. If they include more plants, particularly if they're local, because then the plant, they've been in local soil. So you're informing your immune system about your environment, and informing your system doesn't create inflammation. So if you improve the immune system in your gut, you also improve the immune system in the blood and your aging and longevity, which is very simple. It's something that each of us can do, and it doesn't cost us anything. And you don't even need to do the test. You can just increase diversity.

But you can do the test before. I think that that's fine. I mean, anyone who likes data and numbers, it's fun to kind of be like, okay, where am I now? And then look at some of the different tweaks you can do. And I think with the 30 different plants a week, I love the expression sort of eat the rainbow. And so it's really getting that sort of mix of colors and things as well, because I think most people at this stage have heard it. But, you know, your gut is really your second brain. And I think that there's as many neurons in your gut as there is in a dog's brain. I heard that recently, which I thought was absolutely Interesting, because my dog surprises me every now and then how intelligent she actually is. So I thought, okay, I better be taking care of that quite properly as well. But those sound like really, really exciting research trials that you're doing. And would you then develop protocols for people to use to improve then their health coming off the back of the results from the trials?

Yes. So first you start with a biomarker.. And then you find different therapies and ways to influence it. And of course, we always have this overall biomarker, which is glycan age, which looks at all the glycans on your antibodies, and then that's impacted by everything. So now we're separating little bits and see if, how they apply to different specific applications. But amazing, general aging, you want feedback on everything, so you want it to be as comprehensive as possible. And then you dive into the details.

And to the details as well. Nina, where can people find out more about GlycanAge? Where can they order a test kit? Where can they start reversing their biological age? What would you recommend?

They can go online, or if they're on our Instagram now, we try and create a lot of these simplified videos to translate the science. You can order the box to your home address. It's available internationally. So we have customers in over 40 different countries. Each of the tests comes with a consultation, and it, it is very motivational. So if you're looking for your— if you're still working on your New Year's resolutions, then this is the good time to do it. And if you're putting your energy and effort in anything for your health, you want the feedback if it's working for you in terms of your long-term health. Otherwise, you may be just doing it for physique but actually damaging your long-term health. So it's good to have that feedback. I think all of us have that goal. We just don't have very specific ways to measure it, but now we do.

But now we do, which is so exciting. So just asking anybody listening, if there's any questions for Nina, um, let us know now. Um, feel free to just type in the comments down below. Um, but was otherwise really, really great to have you on, uh, Nina, today. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and all things biological age testing and glycans. So such a pleasure to have you on today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi everyone, this is Claudia again. Before you take off, would you like to get a short email from me with some short but sweet fun tips, tricks, and updates on all things longevity and lifestyle? This could be cool products that I've discovered, interesting posts or articles I've read, and other fun and helpful things around longevity and lifestyle I've found for you. It's a very short piece of inspiration for you a few times a month. So if you want to receive it, check it out by going to longevity-and-lifestyle.com. That's longevity-and-lifestyle.com. And leave your email to sign up for the next one.