You may have just celebrated your 30th, 50th, or 75th birthday, but the cells that make up your body are actually much younger than that. If you go by the numbers, your cells are, on average, around 10 years old, or less.
Your entire skeleton regenerates about once every 10 years.
In fact, most of your body’s cells are constantly being replaced, although its DNA stays the same from the moment the cell is first created (by its parent cell dividing).
Because of this, Jonas Frisen, a stem cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, was able to develop a method to determine just how old your cells really are.
“Dr. Frisen recalled that the nuclear weapons tested above ground until 1963 had injected a pulse of radioactive carbon 14 into the atmosphere. Breathed in by plants worldwide and eaten by animals and people, the carbon 14 gets incorporated into the DNA of cells each time the cell divides and the DNA is duplicated,” writes author Nicholas Wade in his New York Times article “Your Body is Younger Than You Think.”
