The Water Kitchen: AGEs and Aging

You can feel aging before you can see it. The knee that takes longer to warm up. The morning you don’t bounce back after a night out with friends. The stiffness in your lower back that wasn’t there at twenty five, or the loss of youthful energy you once had.

Most people chalk this up to time. The body wears out. That is what bodies do.

But what if a meaningful portion of that wear is not caused by time itself, but by a specific class of compounds accumulating in your tissues, compounds that crosslink your proteins, stiffen your blood vessels, inflame your cells, and degrade your collagen? And what if one of the primary ways those compounds enter your body is through the way you cook your food?

This is the story of advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, and the role they play in how fast you age.