What does metabolic age mean?

The Anthem Plan 00:51 min watch Published 5 March 2026 Dr Ravi Assomull, Consultant Cardiologist

Metabolic age is a concept used to describe how efficiently the body functions compared with typical metabolic markers for a person’s age. In this video, Matt Lovell explains what metabolic age means, how it relates to health and how lifestyle changes can help improve metabolic function.

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Transcript

Your metabolic age is a really interesting one because a lot of these scales at home, the bioimpedance scales that measure your body composition via a very low level of electric current, will also give you something which is called your metabolic age. And sometimes that can be quite a happy reading, and sometimes it's not so fun to see that you may be metabolically older than your actual years. It's measured, the metabolic age on the scales is measured via the relationship to body water.

So if you have a higher body water, you'll have a lower metabolic age. And essentially body water is related to muscle mass in relation to fat mass. So by improving your body composition, you almost always improve your metabolic age.

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