Following Your Gut Podcast #11, Unlocking the Fountain of Youth: Biological Age vs. Chronological Age

Roland Pankewich delves into the intricacies of health across different decades, exploring the shift in physical challenges and the increased health issues faced by younger generations. He differentiates between chronological and biological age, emphasizing how modern stressors impact cellular health and overall well-being. Roland offers insights on optimizing health through lifestyle changes, and the potential for recovery, even in later years, despite the presence of chronic conditions. He advocates for personal responsibility in health management, providing actionable strategies and highlighting the role of the gut in maintaining overall health.

Roland Pankewich is the host of the “Following Your Gut” podcast and a specialist in digestive wellness. Partnered with US Enzymes and Master Supplements, Pankewich focuses on health optimization across various life stages. With a clinical nutritionist background, Pankewich is dedicated to providing insights into health trends and how individuals can adapt to maintain wellness through the decades.

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body."

Chapters

• 0:02 The Decline of Health in Younger Generations
• 6:50 Interconnectedness of Cells and Organs in Human Health
• 9:42 Understanding Stress, Aging, and the Body’s Regenerative Capacity
• 20:33 Maximizing Health and Longevity Through Personalized Lifestyle Changes
• 30:29 30:29 The Importance of Gut Health and Accessible Wellness Resources

Transcript

0:00:02 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the following your Gut podcast and I am your host, Roland Pankewich. Today, doing an episode all by myself, an acapella one, if you will. Well, considering there’s no music behind me, I guess every episode is acapella. But rather than bouncing off another person, I’m going to share some personal insights. And what inspired this specific episode was a recent three month series we did with the US Enzymes Master Supplements platform, looking at health through the ages or health through the decades. And we started at the 20s and 30s and we ended up into the final years of life for whatever number that may be on the calendar.

0:00:41 Roland Pankewich: And we looked at a few things with this One was just a general expose of what the body is like and what the body experiences decade by decade group categorically. The second thing was the experiences of physical challenge or challenges that people are experiencing and dealing with during these time frames of life, the most common things, and also what the trends and patterns are that we’re seeing in 2025, given the scope of what is happening to people as they’re aging and they’re getting older. Because the unfortunate reality that I see nowadays, both clinically and also in discussing with random people, is that there’s a mutual, mutually exclusive relationship of aging and disease being connected in a strong bond. As the person goes through life, we introduce the idea of chronological age and biological age. So chronological age is very simple.

0:01:38 Roland Pankewich: How many birthdays have had in the calendar. Biological age is how old is your physiology in terms of its operating level or its presentation. And how you can display these differently is you can have someone who’s a 70 year old, but they’ve been incredibly healthy and fit their entire lives. So biologically they may be more like a 50 or 55 year old in terms of how they operate and perform. And the inverse is true. You can have someone in their 50s and be so incredibly sick that biologically they could be someone who’s closer to their seventh or eighth decade of life in terms of how their body’s performing.

0:02:13 Roland Pankewich: So in all of this stuff, I found a few very interesting trends and patterns in the research. And I also always grouped that with my own anecdotal clinical experience. The first thing that I’ve noted is that the average person in their 20s and their 30s are not nearly as healthy as they used to be. Most people in this age category, call it 40, 50 years ago, had no health complaints. You know, some transient things here, some food poisoning, getting the odd common cold, flu.

0:02:44 Roland Pankewich: But nowadays a lot of people in their 20s and 30s are dealing with patterns of health that would be more appropriate to someone in their 40s, 50s and onwards. I can think of a few personal clients that I deal with. One is actually as young as 14 who has multiple medical conditions. A few specific diagnoses accompanied with a pattern in the physiology that no one can figure out that causes this person to vomit projectile like when they get incredibly stressed, both physically, mentally and emotionally.

0:03:17 Roland Pankewich: I have another client in their 20s who has, I believe, five or six diagnosed autoimmune conditions. And the average person in their 20s and 30s that I see nowadays physically does not present the health habitus of a body that should be in the prime of its life. Because, physiologically speaking, at the age of 21 to 25, we are in our physical primes. Our hormone profiles are most optimal. We should have the greatest amount of ability to build muscle and also burn body fat efficiently.

0:03:48 Roland Pankewich: We should have our highest perceived and experienced energy levels, Maximal bone density, Greatest tolerance to stress and exercise, and the ability to recover from periods of stress, Be it physical exercise, psychological stress, or anything. The body can get back to baseline and homeostasis really quickly. But we’re starting to see a shift in what’s happening in these people. And you have to ask the question why?

0:04:14 Roland Pankewich: Why would an otherwise healthy person who has not been on this planet for very long Start to show manifestations of physical imbalances to the point where they’re starting to manifest diagnosable conditions? And while I rack my brain for a simple answer to this question, I honestly believe the truth is that first and foremost, a the planet that children are born onto as we know it today is not the environment that is able to foster optimal health Based upon the quality and cleanliness of the environment.

0:04:50 Roland Pankewich: What I mean by that is the amount of environmental hazards that our bodies are exposed to simply by breathing air nowadays, the quality of the drinking water, the lower caliber quality of the food that we eat. Pair that with, you know, stealth things that people can’t quite perceive, but they’re beginning to understand a little bit about things like electromagnetic pollution, Living in a city center, Being able to open up your phone and have a multitude of wi fi routers and 4 and 5G frequencies, always being something that you’re interacting with, Being on a phone all hours of the day, having less quality sleep, having less total sleep, Going to sleep with bright light exposure in your eyes prior to bedtime, and waking up not rested.

0:05:40 Roland Pankewich: All of those things are working together to create the perfect storm that is pushing the body out of balance and ultimately pushing the body into a decreasing threshold of tolerance before something happens. And I think at this point, it’s probably wise to examine and question, well, what happens with the body when it’s going through all of these stresses. So first and foremost, it’s important to understand we have to qualify and categorize how the body works as an interconnected unit. So the body is trillions upon trillions of cells, and each of those cells while having the same basic underpinning. All what are called eukaryotic cells in the human body have key features like the organelles inside the cell. They have a mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum, ribosomes, lysosomes. So underlying each cell, no matter what it is, the cell operates in a common, predictable manner of wanting to make sure that the cell can optimize its internal environment, to maintain health, to bring nutrition in, and to remove waste material, and ultimately to give birth to healthy cells when that cell’s life cycle is over.

0:06:50 Roland Pankewich: So this is the same whether it’s a liver cell, A kidney cell, a neuron, A brain cell, an endothelial cell on the lining of your arteries, an epithelial cell in the lining of your gut or your skin. They all follow the same fundamental tenet that a healthy cell is a cell that’s full of energy, making sure that high quality nutrition is coming in and waste material is getting excreted. When you take a cell or a grouping of cells and you combine them together, you get a tissue, and there are four main types of tissues in the body, and those tissues are incorporated specifically into the different organs.

0:07:26 Roland Pankewich: And then when the tissues become complex enough, you get an organ. And each organ has its own role to uphold and maintain in the body that focuses on playing the role it needs to play so that the body can work as efficiently as possible. So the digestive system is essentially a combination of organs. That’s main job is to break down and absorb food to get nutrition into the system. And once that food has been processed and the cells have converted all the nutrition into whatever waste materials, things go back to the gut, so waste is able to be removed. Part of the process of detoxification is connected to the gut, and that system has to operate effectively for the rest of the organs to be able to function properly.

0:08:13 Roland Pankewich: If you have a gut that is compromised, then you’re going to have an increased toxic burden, which is then going to place additional stress on the kidneys and the liver, which is going to place additional stress on the spleen and the thymus because your immune system is always going to be aggravated and your immune cells are going to be compromised, so on and so forth. So these organ systems have to work effectively to integrate and create what’s called the organism, which is us, the being.

0:08:41 Roland Pankewich: The body, unfortunately, in the Western world has been chopped up and segmented to make it easier for medical professionals to understand and specialize, only focusing on the complexities of what one organ may present. You know, how a liver operates is very different from how a spleen operates. They’re actually very interrelated in terms of one determines how the other will function and vice versa.

0:09:04 Roland Pankewich: And beyond the organism, we have communities, we have the populations of the planet. So it’s all fractally connected. So coming back to the original point I was making, why people are sick, I believe fundamentally is that the cells of each individual organ of the body are under a lot more metabolic stress and environmental stress than they have ever been. And the body is incredible in the sense that it has a built in adaptation capability to deal with some stress and go back to baseline when that stress is perpetual and it is ever increasing slowly, insidiously over time.

0:09:42 Roland Pankewich: As you increase stress dramatically over time, you concurrently decrease the adaptability of the body. And then when you decrease adaptability, you start to run out of energy. And it’s really a healthy body with enough energy as a body that can heal itself. An unhealthy or compromised body with diminishing energy does not have that regenerative capacity and the ability to get back to a healthful baseline.

0:10:08 Roland Pankewich: It starts to operate in a compromised state. This is typically, in my opinion, how all disease is manifested as a patternistic perspective. Of course, there are a lot of details in there, most of which we still don’t know in medical science. We’re trying to figure it out. But what I think is happening nowadays is this is why we’re seeing 20 and 30 year olds developing into people who are manifesting symptoms, imbalances that are leading to diagnosable conditions that will become chronic disease if they do nothing about it as they age.

0:10:43 Roland Pankewich: The good thing is, regardless of how compromised someone might be in their 20s and 30s, the benefit of being this young is you still have the maximum level of regenerative capacity of any stage of life from an adult’s perspective, because you still have youth hormone potential and not being on this planet on your side, you can. If there are issues that we’re seeing with people, they have the ability to regenerate themselves and make a lot of little changes that can make Massive course corrections. And here’s an example of what that might look like. Practically.

0:11:19 Roland Pankewich: You have someone who’s, you know, in their mid-20s and not feeling like they used to, their body starts to change. They are developing some issues with the digestive system. A very basic supplement plan focusing on supporting digestion, maybe giving them some lifestyle strategies to improve their overall activity level, modify some behavioral habits so that they’re getting better quality sleep, using some supplements to help them rest while maybe removing some excessive use of stimulants, which this generation loves to do, and teaching stress management techniques and learning how to breathe and regulate the nervous system.

0:11:57 Roland Pankewich: Even though these people may have manifested symptoms or may have some sort of diagnosis, I. E. Insulin resistance, some sort of autoimmune like presentation, if the body receives consistent information that is able to harmonize and stabilize the symptoms that are being presented, and consistently allows the body to rewire its way of operating, I. E. It gets out of a stress response, it gets out of a cell danger response, if you will, and starts to enter a healing cycle, then that person presenting those imbalanced symptoms or better yet manifested conditions can actually go into sort of a remission of condition or they can totally get their life back. And I’ve seen this happen many times clinically with young people, where you make a couple quick and easy decisions for some, some initial wins, and then you really work on dialing in the lifestyle habits.

0:12:53 Roland Pankewich: These people get back to a baseline of optimal health and their issues and conditions become a distant memory. But what happens when you go from the 20s and 30s to the 40s and 50s? Well, this is where it becomes a little bit more challenging. Why? Because these people have had a lot longer to accumulate dysfunctional physiologic patterns in the body, which I’ll explain. And they’re also chronically exposing themselves to a style of life that becomes less and less able for them to dedicate the time they need to heal.

0:13:22 Roland Pankewich: Because? Because most people in this phase of life are in their career primes, they may have families who come before them and add that to the fact that they’ve been on the planet for four or five decades, the body has probably had the ability to accumulate a lot of biotoxic material insidiously over the course of time. So the same pattern that you see in the 20s and 30s, where they’re looking more like the 40s and 50s, the 40 and the 50 year olds are now looking like what the 60 plus crowd would be like a generation back. Why?

0:13:54 Roland Pankewich: Because they’re aging faster when you get into the 40s and 50s, unfortunately, most people have had multiple things that have been early warning signs. And typically we in the Western world are really good at ignoring these things. Oh, I have a headache, I’m just going to take a Tylenol, my digestive system’s off. I have heartburn, I’m just going to take an antacid. They don’t realize that those symptoms are the body’s early warning signs of trying to get their attention to tell them that something is not working optimally.

0:14:23 Roland Pankewich: But because we’re so dialed into how our lives are being you know, operated and constructed from an automated perspective, human nature is quite funny. Anything that is habitual is efficient, and anything that’s efficient doesn’t use a lot of energy, thus it doesn’t waste a lot of time. So I can see how it’s so easy that someone who’s experiencing a lot of these habitual low level symptoms just ignores them, masks them, or puts a band aid over them and just goes forwards.

0:14:53 Roland Pankewich: The reality is these things keep persisting in a nagging way until they become too much to ignore. The body becomes too compromised for it to just be something that you stuff down and just walk off, so to speak. And this is where people finally have, I guess, the necessity to seek out a diagnosis from a medical professional. And this is where they’re getting, oh, you have such and such thing going on with your cardiovascular system, you have such and such autoimmune condition, so on, so forth.

0:15:26 Roland Pankewich: And this is where people start to become highly, highly reactive because the diagnosis comes out of nowhere. But if they were to look back and take stock of all the things that they ignored, providing they actually have memory of going, oh, yeah, I have, I have been experiencing that for a long time. I just didn’t think anything about it. This is when they would realize that anything that is the beginnings of chronic degeneration has always been bubbling up below the surface for multiple years, if not a decade plus prior to the manifestation of the actual symptom or the diagnosis of a condition.

0:16:02 Roland Pankewich: This is what physiology does. So the first fundamental understanding that I wanted to present was this model of how cells, tissues, organs and the organism are interconnected. The second thing which I think rings true for people in this age category is you have healthful operation. What I mean by healthful operation is the body only knows how to sustain its operation and existence as a body. The body doesn’t know health and disease, it just knows its way of being, which in an optimal state, with no interruptions, or perturbations would just be health.

0:16:36 Roland Pankewich: Healthful operation is the body’s chosen narrative or prime directive. When something throws the body off. And these things can be minute in nature. You know about a food poisoning, a bad infection when they were a kid, some kind of massive chemical toxic exposure. It could even be a physical trauma or a psycho emotional trauma. Any of these things start to create an imbalance in the body. That imbalance in the body changes the body’s operating system from optimal to compensation.

0:17:08 Roland Pankewich: And the body has a lot of Plan Bs, Plan Cs in terms of how it can compensate, which is an incredible gift of our physiology. But over the course of time, what ends up happening is it starts to run out of compensation responses and those imbalances eventually become too numerous or too, too much, too great in magnitude, I should probably say, to mask or ignore. So then a symptom starts to pop up. And a symptom is an overt issue. It’s something that you can’t ignore.

0:17:37 Roland Pankewich: You bend down. Every time you bend down, your right knee hurts. You know, every day you stand up from the couch, your low back is throbbing, you have tightness in your neck and shoulders, you have acid reflux, as I mentioned before, you have issues with constipation, bowel habits, whatever. These are symptoms to show you that some area of the body, a specific body system, organ, combination of organ systems, is functioning in a compromised way.

0:18:01 Roland Pankewich: And if you leave that long enough over time, you don’t know that this is happening. But under the surface, this is when the physiology becomes truly dysfunctional. And in my world, the dysfunctional physiology is kind of synonymous with the idea of the manifestation of an illness or a disease or the body in dis ease is what creates illness. Because for me, disease and illness are not the same thing. I like the idea of wordplay, even the idea of regeneration is regeneration.

0:18:35 Roland Pankewich: Most of the aspect of what helps our bodies regenerate is to take out all the dysfunction that are driving genetic errors that are causing negative epigenetic transcriptions in our bodies that are one of the major hallmarks of chronic degenerative conditions that develop for most people. So in the 40s and 50s is when you have your oh crap moment, you’re given a diagnosis, you’re told that you have this problem with your physiology and you have a choice point, you have a choice point to enter a system that a lot of people enter. That system is the game of managing symptoms with pharmaceutical drugs.

0:19:11 Roland Pankewich: And in some cases I can see why, under duress or in, you know, grave crises, that can be a necessity while someone figures out what they’re going to do about the long term resolution. But we have to understand that the body is what heals itself. The energy that created the body ultimately is the energy that heals the body. So what that means is what you take is not going to heal you. What you take provides a signal that the body interprets and it will re regulate its compromised way of operating, hopefully to a more healthful way of operating. And it will remove the blockage that the body currently has to heal. Because if the body could heal itself, it will.

0:19:56 Roland Pankewich: This is how people become able to reverse the development of non progressive regenerative conditions. What I mean by that is if someone is given a diagnosis of say type 2 diabetes, they’re able to restore or reverse type 2 diabetes based upon what their biomarkers look like on the blood test. If someone has an autoimmune condition and they’re in chronic flare ups, if they make the necessary changes and the necessary changes are individualized to that person, they can silence the chronic flare up scenario and their condition can go into a state of remission.

0:20:33 Roland Pankewich: And this is the opportunity for people in the 40s and 50s, because they don’t have the healing capacity of someone who’s in their 20s and 30s. But with the right combination of inputs and variables, the right supplement plan, the right lifestyle changes, the right dietary changes, so on and so forth, again, it’s a perfect combination for that person. So we can’t make generalized statements, but if they get everything right and they can harmonize all the input signals for the system of the body, then there’s no reason that person cannot entirely reverse the presentation that they’re dealing with.

0:21:10 Roland Pankewich: Or they can have a massive degree of alleviation of how severe and stressful that condition is presenting itself. And if that person will be able to commit to a healthy lifestyle, what the opportunity they have here is they have a massive opportunity to have their 60s, 70s and 80s, which depending upon how sick they were in their 40s and 50s, the 80s might not have even been on the table before. But their last quarter of life can look dramatically different in terms of both quality of life and the quantity of life. And subjectively, I’m always about quality because I wouldn’t want to be 85, but entirely dependent as a quadriplegic living in an assisted living facility. And that’s really about personal responsibility in terms of what’s important to you moving forwards.

0:21:57 Roland Pankewich: And then we had the last group that we looked at we had the 60s and onwards. And I don’t like to lump groups together for the simple fact that in your 60s and in your 90s, it’s a very different category. But let’s say people are getting the seniors discount at certain restaurants and certain pharmacies. So this aspect of life’s greatest limitation is that, well, first and foremost, I think statistically over 80% of them already have a diagnosed condition where they’re being medicated for.

0:22:25 Roland Pankewich: And I believe it’s over 60%, maybe under 70%, have two or more diagnosed conditions which they are already medicated for. So you already also have the additional characteristic and complexity of potentially taking something to manage the symptoms from other pharmaceuticals that you’re on. But the other weakness that this category has is the regenerative capacity is the worst of all cohorts because unfortunately, the body is not like a fine wine.

0:22:53 Roland Pankewich: It does not get better with age. But the. The slope of the line of senescence, I. E. The slow drop off of vitality doesn’t have to look like a rock falling off a cliff. It can look. It’s kind of like, you know, one of those escalators that go down in the mall. A steady, steep decline, which you can’t help. But far less precipitous than something that’s a drop off. Most people in this age category, if they have a diagnosed condition, I don’t want to manifest anything in anyone’s reality, but let’s just say it’s harder to reverse something that’s been in the body for three or four plus decades to the point where it’s entirely gone.

0:23:32 Roland Pankewich: It’s not impossible, but those cases, depending upon how the person is managing their health, are probably less common than they are not. But that being said, anything’s possible. The key with dealing with someone in this age category, if that is your practice focus or if you are this person, is, you have to think about the return of investment you’re getting on anything you do or don’t do to yourself.

0:24:01 Roland Pankewich: What I mean by that is the impact of a night of poor quality sleep in your 70s is probably a lot less severe if you’re trying to improve your health than it is in your 20s. The nature of overexerting yourself and not prioritizing your recovery is again, more severe in your 70s than it is in your 20s, because the body just doesn’t have the same stress tolerance and reserves. The key thing that these people have working in their favor is hopefully their retirement years are being good to them. They live a life Filled with purpose, with wonderful family. So they have something to live for and they have time on their side that they can make this their focus, they can make this the, the absolute prime directive of their existence to maximize the number of quality years that they have left.

0:24:49 Roland Pankewich: And that really does take into account honoring everything that helps every body, not everybody, but every single body on the planet, and maximizing their individuated way of relating to this. So what are those things? Well, honoring circadian rhythm, maximizing your way of operating in relationship to the sun and the moon, to make sure that your physiology’s rhythms are naturally entrained to being in the environment.

0:25:15 Roland Pankewich: Making sure that you’re prioritizing food quality, water quality over quantity, restricting excessive, over consumption of food, which will really help in terms of energy levels and body composition and overall default inflammatory status. But making sure that you’re chewing and focusing on digestion and making adequate protein intake and adequate fiber intake something that you focus on. Because muscle loss and microbiome health typically both decline. Muscle loss in the sense of you lose muscle dramatically quickly, quicker as you age than you do in your younger years because your hormone levels are not nearly as optimized.

0:25:55 Roland Pankewich: And the microbiome of an aging person stip typically starts to become less diverse and more homogeneous. So you don’t have that same gut immune interaction and communication that underpins a healthy gut microbiome and ultimately digestion and absorption and making sure that these people are being active, resistance training zone one and zone two cardio to keep the cardiovascular system and the oxygen carrying capacities of the body optimal, and mobility exercises, which typically are something that people lose as they age because they’ve spent the prior five decades sitting in a chair, going to the office, in a car, sitting at a desk all day long, coming home exhausted, watching TV before they fall fall asleep.

0:26:39 Roland Pankewich: So all of these things are absolutely paramount. To make sure that you can bring the necessary support in a variety of different ways into the body. So the body can do what it’s best able to do, maintain a healthful degree of operation and mitigate any stresses that are imposed upon the body that push the body out of balance, taking away some of the precious little energy reserves the person has left to deal with the stress, but not necessarily having enough energy left to heal the body, which is what generates an imbalanced symptom and ultimately manifestation of disease presentation in the first place.

0:27:20 Roland Pankewich: So that was a very quick Reader’s digest version of some of the things that we focused on over the last three months. That was really Its own expose as a part one, two and three. And just to quickly recap, you know, the 20s and 30s really are the high point of life. What I mean by the high point is the body is in its greatest state to be in the highest performance echelon that it possibly can have.

0:27:46 Roland Pankewich: And it’s the habits that people set in their 20s and 30s that determine if they have to do damage control in the 40s and afterwards, versus if they enter the 40s and 50s and they’re aging gracefully but they’re not getting old, if that makes sense. The 40s and 50s, I think, is the hardest because all of the societal impositions, stresses and responsibilities typically make you the last in the list in terms of the focus.

0:28:13 Roland Pankewich: And this is where you need to be in many ways even more focused. Because if you’re already dealing something or dealing with something in your 40s and 50s, it will only get worse unless you find a point or a methodology to address it and change the course of where you’re going. Because in the 60s and upwards, where society is showing itself patternistically by most people already having something that they’re dealing with.

0:28:43 Roland Pankewich: Medical science as we know it is usually quite slow in the sense of figuring out what the practical action is from a newly elucidated finding of research. So you really do have to be somewhat responsible for yourself here. Because if you get to that point in your life and you’re in your 60s and you’re finding that things are not going in the right direction, unfortunately, unless you take matters into your own hands and become somewhat aware of how the body works, aware of what patterns work out for you optimally, it’s probably not going to get better before it gets worse.

0:29:19 Roland Pankewich: But everyone needs to have their moment of, shall we say, it come to self realization where they, they have to decide that this is the focus of their life, this is the responsibility that they’re going to take, and a diagnosis is not destiny. So I’ll leave you all with that. Thank you very much for allowing me to share some of my takeaways. Insights from something that I thought was an incredibly interesting thing to examine, both from a societal perspective of looking at where the trends are going. And right now, unless we do something, I don’t like where those trends are going. But the good news is health has become more popular than ever. It’s become more vogue. If you scan social media, if you watch YouTube, there’s incredible people sharing incredible information that is pretty much able for anyone to have access to. And the key is if you’re able to make this your focus, if it becomes of the utmost importance to you and you’re willing to commit yourself to the path, there are great products, great pieces of information and great resources out there. And we try to do that with what it is we have with the US Enzymes and the master supplements product portfolios.

0:30:29 Roland Pankewich: You know, being a digestive wellness company, the one thing that I can say is all of the things that I was speaking about today have a very strong connection to the gut. So if you are someone who’s struggling regardless of what it is you’re struggling with, you know, go over to the website, check out the product portfolio. We have great customer service staff who can answer any questions that you may have. And we also have a really good YouTube channel where a lot of the lectures that I’ve done over the last four or five years are up there focusing on some of these body specific conditions and talking about some of the chronic diseases and issues that people are dealing with.

0:31:03 Roland Pankewich: So if that calls to you, I hope we can be a resource. As always, thank you for listening. We will be back very soon with another episode, some of which will be me sharing some more insights and we’ll have other great guests coming soon. So as always, thank you for being part of this. Thank you for listening. We’ll talk to you soon.