In this IG Live segment, Nikolina Lauc frames aging as the earliest inflection point for later disease, arguing that intervening on biological aging is a form of preventive health. She critiques conventional medicine’s reactive approach and highlights research showing that excessive exercise can trigger chronic inflammation, bone loss, and accelerated biological age, especially in women. Lauc explains that while moderate exercise and caloric restriction each lower biological age, their combination paradoxically raises inflammation and age markers. She details sex‑specific aging patterns, noting that women experience a sharp increase in biological aging during the perimenopausal transition, which is often undiagnosed due to vague, long‑lasting symptoms that are misattributed to other conditions. Lauc discusses how pregnancy temporarily lowers biological age due to high estrogen, but post‑partum hormonal shifts and sleep loss can increase age by up to a year, with recovery taking one to two years. Finally, she emphasizes the gut microbiome’s role in systemic inflammation, recommending a diverse plant‑based diet (≈30 different plants per week) to boost microbial diversity, improve immune regulation, and support longevity. Throughout, she balances caution about over‑intervention with optimism about actionable lifestyle changes.
Chapters
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's like, 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. 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. 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 overexercising. So you can overexercise, 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 accumulating the damage, then you have no benefit. Maybe visual, but it's actually not good for your health. So being on a caloric restriction diet on its own is beneficial. Exercising on its own, we did Sprint 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. 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 assumed 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 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?" 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. Oh, 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 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. 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. Estrogen is an anti-inflammatory. You will 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 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. Microbiome is one big area of, 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 individual case studies, they reduce quite significantly if they include more plants, particularly if they're local, because then the plant, they've been in local soil. So if 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 your 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.
