What is the RealAge concept?

There's the calendar age of your body, which is based on your birthday, and then there's the actual age of your body, which is based on lifestyle choices. Michael Roizen, MD explains how the RealAge idea originated.

Transcript

00:00

Being dead doesn't motivate people who are young, because it's too far in the future. But the energy level you have now does.

00:15

So RealAge was in trying to motivate people. When I would approach people, and I was a crazy guy,

00:24

lived at the University of Chicago campus. And in walking across the campus, I would see students outside the Student Union smoking.

00:35

And I'd go up to them and say, you know, smoking kills you.

00:41

Do you want some help quitting? And you know what they did? They gave me an appropriate finger salute.

00:48

So then I said, well, being dead doesn't motivate people who are young, because it's too far in the future,

00:56

but the energy level you have now does. And when I started approaching them

01:02

about wrinkles or impotence, or things that took away their energy, they stopped and came to me.

01:10

They helped have me help them stop smoking. Well, I was running in the anesthesia and critical care

01:19

department, and part of the data that actually Toby Cosgrove had accumulated first at the Cleveland Clinic,

01:26

even though I was at UC San Francisco and then in Chicago at the time, was that for every 10 years younger you are, you have 1/3

01:35

the mortality rate. So when he operated on someone who was 75, if there was a 3% mortality rate, if that same operation,

01:44

same everything else, was done in a 65-year-old, it was 1%. And if you did that same thing in a 55-year-old,

01:51

it was 1/3 of a percent. So you lowered the complication rates and mortality by threefold for making someone 10 years younger.

02:00

So I said, our job in anesthesia is to make people, if you will, 10 years younger in the two weeks surrounding

02:09

the perioperative period. And in learning how to do that, we learned how to chronically help people make

02:15

their RealAge younger. So your RealAge is the actual age of your body as opposed to your calendar age, which is just the number of birthday