Health & Medicine

Functional Medicine: Your Aging Body

By admin | January 1, 2026 0 Comments

By Dr. Cynthia Crosser

Do you feel stiff in the morning? Is it harder to stand up after sitting and do your hips hurt? Can you get up from the floor? These are all very classic issues that most people feel SHOULD happen as they age and just accept it. However, we all know those folks that still take exercise classes, ride bikes, and hike up mountains. Today we call them proagers and they are living with a good health span and longevity. What might be different and how can we achieve this quality of life?

This is connected to what we call immunometabolic health – fancy words that mean our immune system and our metabolic health clearly intersect. And the systems’ biology and our lifestyle choices, such as nutrition, sleeping habits, toxic exposures, and other integrative interventions can restore balance, enhance resilience, and extend healthspan. Chronic inflammation is a symptom of an imbalanced immune system and can be seen as metabolic dysregulation. In addition, during an infectious condition, our cells may use as much as 50% of our body energy driven by those powerhouses called mitochondria. So the goal is to maintain immune resilience as we age which actually has been proven to be a major factor in our longevity.

The good news – we do have biomarkers that will tell us where we are well before we get into chronic disease. HRV, or heart rate variability is a marker of autonomic balance and better immune regulation and is influenced by sleep, breathwork, and fitness. Grip strength is a predictor of longevity and correlates with mitochondrial output which reflects the systemic inflammatory burden. Our waist-to-hip ratio is another indicator of systemic inflammation with a target of <.9 for men and <.85 for women. The Sit-to-Stand Test is a measure of neuromuscular resilience. How many times can you stand from sitting in a 30-second window? VO2 max is yet another way of telling us of your uptake of oxygen which is the gold standard of cardiometabolic fitness and a powerful longevity indicator. How many steps do you take daily which correlates with your immune resilience? Optimal is 8-10 thousand per day. And we need to exercise in zone 2 and utilize resistance training. And then we need excellent sleep, ideally 7-9 hours per night which restores immune function, impacts glucose control, cortisol levels, and your HRV. And then we have nutrition, a very important factor. A diet rich in polyphenols, Omega-3s from actual fish vs. fish oils, prebiotics and probiotics. At least once per year a functional stool sample should be done to assess your microbiome. Forty percent of our immune system patterning is connected to our diets. There is so much more to each of these indicators to even include a calculation of the Systemic Inflammatory Index which can be calculated through a basic CBC and are ways that we can see how we are aging with a positive healthspan. There aren’t any shortcuts for any of us and it requires continuous, daily efforts. With wearable devices and technology to assist us in our dietary choices, monitoring our exercise and sleep, we can do this! Knowing the details of extensive bloodwork can be a great first step to providing professional lifestyle interventions to monitor and help you achieve your goals of living fully. For each patient I see at all ages, understanding how powerful our choices are and helping them to know how to change, provides for them a lifetime of truly feeling ALIVE! Now who wouldn’t want this level of personalized care!? You can follow me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook or reach me at crossernaturalhealth.com or 302-994-1010.