Your results are normal. But are you optimal?

For most of my life, a check-up had two possible answers: something is wrong, or you are fine. If nothing on the lab report was printed in red, I went home happy and forgot about my health until the next time, which was usually years later.

Then, on our quest, my son and I met Andrea Maier, one of the world’s leading longevity doctors. In Singapore she is a Professor of Medicine at NUS, and she co-founded Chi Longevity, the clinic where I had the most thorough check-up of my life. In our very first interview, in Dublin in August 2023, she took my idea of “fine” apart with a school report:

“So normal is not enough. So if you just have normal scores in school, like parents most of the times are not very excited. You want to be the best in class, and the same holds for our body.”

A normal range tells you that your numbers look like most people’s. It does not tell you that you are doing as well as you could. Nobody throws a party when a child comes home with average grades, and yet that is exactly how we treat our bodies.

In August 2024, at ARDD in Copenhagen, Andrea and Dr Naras Lapsys went through my results with me. I said I had never felt better, in body, mind and heart, and that six years had gone by without a single illness. She smiled at that and answered:

“… but are you optimal? That’s I think the question.”

I wasn’t. My GlycanAge, a test that reads the quiet, chronic inflammation that wears the body down long before you notice anything, put my body more than twenty years ahead of my birthday. Other clocks, including my metabolic age, made me twenty years younger. No single number tells you everything, but together they showed me exactly where to work.

Some of my friends still tell me they would rather not know. What I tell them now is what Andrea told me in Copenhagen:

“… it’s a test, so don’t worry about it because we wouldn’t test if we couldn’t change it.”

Normal is where most check-ups end. Optimal is where longevity begins.

So the question I want everybody to start asking is not “am I sick?” but “am I optimal?”. And Andrea wants that question asked in ordinary hospitals, not only in private clinics, so that it reaches everyone.

Why Andrea calls aging a disease we can treat, my friends who would rather not know, and the day the clinic’s dietitian found room for improvement in my diet are all in the full story on the Live Beyond Hub:

The full article on the Live Beyond Hub

Aging is a disease. So let’s treat it.

12-minute read · 9 photographs · 6× longer than this page

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