Choose Your Age: Unlocking the Cellular Science of Longevity

In this groundbreaking manual for longevity, leading longevity expert Jean-Marc Lemaitre reveals how the latest science can help you measure, slow, and even reverse biological aging at a cellular level.

For generations, we've accepted aging as an inevitable decline, measuring our years by birthdays while ignoring the more crucial metric—our biological age. Traditional medicine continues to treat the symptoms of age-related diseases rather than addressing their root cause: cellular aging itself. Too often, healthcare systems intervene only after disease has taken hold, managing decline rather than preventing it.

In Choose Your Age, Jean-Marc Lemaitre—a renowned biogerontologist (a scientist of biological aging and age-related diseases)—presents a revolutionary alternative: a personalized, proactive approach to longevity that targets the fundamental mechanisms of aging before disease begins.

This is not speculation or trendy "biohacking"—it's cutting-edge science: a comprehensive, evidence-based strategy for extending not just lifespan but healthspan, the years you spend free from disease and decline. Lemaitre's approach isn't prescriptive but educational, empowering you to understand the science of aging so you can make informed decisions about your health journey. In Choose Your Age, readers will discover:

• Why your chronological age is often misleading, and how new biological clocks can measure your true physiological age—revealing whether you're aging faster or slower than your peers.
• How telomeres, the protective caps on your chromosomes, influence aging, and what practical steps can help maintain their length and integrity.
• The revolutionary science of epigenetic reprogramming that could transform medicine's approach to aging by actually reversing cellular age.
• Why the Mediterranean diet and specific fasting protocols can dramatically impact longevity, and how to adapt these approaches to your unique biochemistry.
• How the lifestyles of centenarians in the world's "Blue Zones" offer practical insights for extending your own healthspan.
• The emerging potential of senolytic therapies, metformin, and rapamycin in targeting senescent "zombie cells" that accelerate aging.
• Why social connections, optimism, and time in nature are as crucial to longevity as any medical intervention—and how to incorporate them into your life.

Choose Your Age provides a new paradigm for thinking about aging, transforming it from an inevitable decline into a manageable process that you can influence at every stage of life. With this roadmap in hand, you can chart a different course for your future—one where each decade brings not just more years, but better ones.

Jean-Marc Lemaitre is a leading expert in longevity and aging. Trained as a biogerontologist, he is the research director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research at the Institute of Regenerative Medicine and Biotherapy in Montpellier (IRMB). His work focuses on the mechanisms behind human aging and restoring functionality to organs that have changed because of aging. He lives in Montpellier, France.

Bronwyn Haslam is a Montreal-based translator with degrees in modern literature and languages and in cellular, molecular, and microbial biology. With Aleshia Jensen, she was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and the 2023 Cole Foundation Prize for their translation of Mirion Malle’s This Is How I Disappear.