Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow.

This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals.

My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the

health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.

Today I had the honor of connecting with Dr. Morgan Levine, who is an assistant professor of pathology at

Yale University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the science of biological aging,

specifically using bioinformatics to quantify the aging process and

test how lifestyle and pharmaceutical interventions alter the rate of aging.

She is the author of the book True Age which I had the honor of reading earlier this year.

Today we dove deep into her background the role of biologic aging and epigenetics the impact of

lifestyle how our cells age the impact of lifestyle of lifestyle how our cells age the role of cellular senescence and zombie cells

why aging is considered to be a disease state research on women and menopause, the impact of genes, especially apoe, why our number of fat cells are determined early in our lives,

blue zones, fasting and hormones, oris, exercise and sleep, all of which contribute to how we age.

I hope you will enjoy this conversation you and talking about your new book.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

So I think everyone's backgrounds are so interesting. Did you always know that you wanted to go into research and study the kind of complex intricacies of the aging process? I know that I when I was reading your book I know about your parents and your background but listeners would probably enjoy to hear a little bit about your story.

Yeah, so I don't think I always knew I wanted to be a scientist or go into research here. I was very kind of worried about the aging process growing up because I had older

parents particularly my father was much older is in his mid-50s when I was born. So I was always worried about his aging and I saw aging at a very young age. And it wasn't until probably I got to college and actually found that there is a scientific field who's actually interested in, you know, can you do anything about the aging process?

Not necessarily that we're going to all live forever, but can you live a healthier life for as long as possible and really postpone the onset of all these diseases?

So once that became a possibility, then I was kind of hooked and felt like I had to work in that field and make it my mission to understand it.

And it's interesting because I think on a lot of levels people think about anti-aging they think it's all this physical

you know this kind of phenotype what we look like what our hair looks like what our skin looks like and in your

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