10 Mindblowing Things That Happen As You Age
6. You Might Be Older Than You Think
They say that age is just a number, but it might not even be that.
We like to break our lives down into easy-to-handle weeks, months and years, but actually, it turns out that our bodies have got other ideas.
The fact is that some people's bodies are just programmed to age faster than others and two people of the age of 30 may actually have drastically different "biological ages".
Researchers in New Zealand put over 1,000 people through a series of tests to determine the functionality of their eyes, liver, kidneys, lungs, blood pressure and cholesterol and found that, at the "birth age" of 38, people could have a biological age of anything between 30 and 60 years old.
They also found that the "fast agers" performed worse at balance, coordination and mental acuity tests.
This research isn't just there to scare and depress you, however, it is actually very useful in the world of organ donation. A transplanted organ is much more likely to fail the older it is and, with the age of organ donors on the up, it would be helpful to be able to determine the biological age of a donor as well as their legal age. A 50-year-old with the body of a 30-year-old will potentially have more viable organs than if it were the other way around.
And this is all before taking into account the horrible abuses that most of us put our bodies through in our attempts to fill it up with as much wine as possible of a weekend.