- Tension: A man who does everything right — exercise, diet, sleep — discovers his biological age is nearly two years older than it should be, and the culprit has nothing to do with his habits.
- Noise: We focus on lifestyle choices as the primary drivers of aging, but invisible chemical exposures like PFAS may be quietly overriding those choices, and men appear to bear a disproportionate biological cost.
- Direct Message: Forever chemicals are accelerating biological aging in men by nearly two years, and because PFAS contamination is everywhere, the damage has nothing to do with personal choices and everything to do with what the world put inside us before we had a say.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Derek Haines turned 38 last March and decided, on a whim, to get one of those biological age tests his coworker kept raving about. Derek is a project manager in Columbus, Ohio. He runs three miles most mornings, doesn’t smoke, drinks moderately. He expected the results to confirm what he already felt: that he was doing fine. Instead, the epigenetic clock came back reading 39.8. Almost two years older than his birth certificate said he should be.
His doctor wasn’t alarmed. “Within normal range,” she told him. But Derek couldn’t shake it. He’d done everything right, or thought he had. He ate well. He exercised. He slept seven hours. So where were those phantom years coming from?
A study published in early 2024 might have the answer, and it has nothing to do with his habits.
Researchers at the University of Southern California and the Keck School of Medicine examined data from over 1,500 adults enrolled in NHANES, the ongoing national health survey, and found that men with the highest blood concentrations of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called “forever chemicals”) showed biological aging acceleration of approximately 1.6 to 2.1 years compared to men with the lowest levels. The findings, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, were striking for a specific reason: the effect was significantly more pronounced in men than in women.
PFAS are synthetic chemicals used in nonstick cookware, water-resistant clothing, food packaging, stain-resistant carpets, and certain firefighting foams. They’re called “forever chemicals” because their molecular structure resists breaking down in the environment or the human body. The CDC estimates that PFAS are detectable in the blood of 97% of Americans. They aren’t something you opt into. They’re already there.
The USC research team used epigenetic clocks, specifically the GrimAge and PhenoAge algorithms, to measure biological age. These tools analyze patterns of DNA methylation, tiny chemical tags on your genome that shift as you age, to estimate how old your body actually is versus how old the calendar says you are. When the researchers controlled for smoking, BMI, diet, income, and education, the PFAS-aging link held firm. In men, several specific PFAS compounds (PFOS, PFOA, and PFHxS) correlated with accelerated epigenetic aging in a dose-dependent manner: higher blood levels, faster aging.
Women showed some associations too, but they were weaker and less consistent. The researchers hypothesized that estrogen may offer a partial buffer, a possibility that raises uncomfortable questions about what happens to that protection after menopause.
As we explored in a recent piece on how forever chemicals are linked to faster biological aging starting earlier than expected, this isn’t a phenomenon that waits until middle age to show up. PFAS accumulation begins in utero. By the time someone like Derek is worrying about his epigenetic clock at 38, the chemical exposure has been compounding for decades.
Consider Naomi Gutierrez, a 44-year-old public school teacher in Tucson. She read about the PFAS study and immediately thought about her husband, Raúl, who’s 46 and was recently diagnosed with borderline thyroid dysfunction. Thyroid disruption is one of the most well-documented effects of PFAS exposure. Raúl works in construction, eats takeout most days (often from containers coated in PFAS-laden grease-resistant linings), and drinks from the municipal water supply, which in parts of Arizona has tested above EPA advisory levels for PFAS. “He’s always been the healthy one,” Naomi said. “But lately something’s been off. He’s tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.”
That kind of fatigue, the kind that doesn’t respond to rest, is one of the subtle signatures of accelerated biological aging. The cells are under oxidative stress. Inflammation is low-grade but chronic. The machinery of repair and regeneration starts running behind schedule.
The PFAS-aging connection also intersects with something broader: the growing understanding that aging is modifiable, and that the things accelerating it are often invisible. We’ve covered how neuroscientists found a protein that appears to keep certain brains from aging, explaining why some 80-year-olds think like they’re 50. And research into so-called “super agers” has revealed that their brains are still producing new neurons well into their 80s, and the difference isn’t genetics. The picture emerging from all these findings is that biological aging is a negotiation between what your body can repair and what it’s being forced to fight.
PFAS, it turns out, load the dice on the fighting side.
Ben Kowalski, 51, is a water quality analyst in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city that spent years grappling with PFAS contamination from a nearby manufacturing site. Ben has monitored his own bloodwork for a decade. His PFOS levels, while declining since the area switched filtration systems, remain above what he’s comfortable with. “I know the chemistry,” he said. “I know these things don’t just wash out. My body has been storing this stuff since before I understood what it was.”
Ben’s frustration captures something essential about the PFAS problem. Individual action has limited power here. You can swap your nonstick pan for cast iron. You can install a reverse osmosis filter. You can avoid microwave popcorn bags and fast-food wrappers. But PFAS are in rainwater. They’re in soil. They’re in the blood of polar bears in the Arctic. The contamination is so total that the conversation about “reducing exposure” starts to feel like telling someone to dodge individual raindrops in a hurricane.
That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. The EPA finalized its first-ever national drinking water standard for PFAS in April 2024, setting limits for six specific compounds. Some states have moved faster: Maine banned PFAS in all products by 2030. The science is forcing policy, slowly.
But policy timelines and biological timelines don’t match. The men in the USC study weren’t workers at chemical plants. They were ordinary people with ordinary exposures, living ordinary lives. And their bodies were aging faster than they should have been. The youngest participants in the cohort, men in their twenties, already showed the pattern.
A separate but related concern is how PFAS exposure interacts with other aging accelerants. A recent study linking a popular brain supplement to shorter lifespan in men underscored how things we assume are protective can sometimes add to the burden. The body doesn’t process each stressor in isolation. PFAS-driven inflammation stacks with poor sleep, with air pollution, with metabolic dysfunction. The epigenetic clock doesn’t care about the source of the damage. It just records the total.
Derek Haines, back in Columbus, started making changes after his test results. He replaced his cookware. He bought a water filter. He stopped microwaving food in plastic. Small things. “Probably won’t undo anything,” he admitted. “But it felt wrong to know and do nothing.”
That impulse, the refusal to sit with the knowledge passively, might matter more than the individual interventions. Because the research on biological aging keeps revealing something that’s quietly radical: the body is always keeping score, and the score is always being updated. Epigenetic changes aren’t permanent in the way genetic mutations are. Remove the stressor, and some degree of reversal is possible. The clock can, in certain conditions, tick backward.
Which means the nearly two years that PFAS may be stealing from men like Derek and Raúl and Ben aren’t necessarily gone forever. They’re being held hostage by chemistry that we invented, mass-produced, and released into every corner of the planet before we understood what it would cost. The bill is arriving now, written in the methylation patterns of men who never asked to carry it. And the most unsettling part is how quiet it is. No symptoms. No warnings. Just a body aging slightly faster than it should, for reasons that have nothing to do with how you live and everything to do with what the world put inside you before you had a say.
Feature image by Marcus Aurelius on Pexels
