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  Real-age guru makes case for healthy livingBy Peggy Peck Editor's note: CNN.com has a business partnership with MedPageToday.com, which provides custom health content. A medical profile from MedPage Today appears each Tuesday.  Dr. Michael Roizen's calendar age is 60 but he says his "real age" is 42. HEALTH LIBRARYYOUR E-MAIL ALERTSCLEVELAND, Ohio (MedPage Today) -- Ask Dr. Michael F. Roizen how old he is and you will get two answers: 60 and 42. Sixty, he explained, is his calendar age, the one on his driver's license, but his "real age" is calculated by his life -- what he eats, how often he exercises, how much sleep he gets, and how well he avoids stress. And that, he says, is what real age is really all about. Health risks and healthy habits can add or subtract years from his calendar age to give him his "real age," a concept that he promotes as co-founder and chairman of RealAge Inc., author of a number of books beginning with "RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be" (1999) to "YOU: The Owner's Manual" (2005), which he co-authored with Dr. Mehmet Oz, a heart surgeon at Columbia University in New York. All of that seems an unlikely resume for the man who chairs the Division of Anesthesiology, Critical Care Medicine, and Comprehensive Pain Management at Cleveland Clinic. But Roizen is an anesthesiologist who has a real passion for critical care medicine, a passion that drives his main professional goal -- to keep people healthy so that they won't require a stay in an intensive care unit. 'Neat job'All of which started when he was a 9-year-old in Buffalo, New York. "I was sick and a pediatrician came to our house to care for me and I got better. I thought: what a neat job. He makes people feel better. They respect him. And he earns money doing it. I decided to become a doctor." He attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, as a pre-med student and medical school at the University of California San Francisco. From there he went to Boston for graduate training at Beth Israel Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. During one of his rotations, a pediatric resident asked whether she could borrow his otoscope, the instrument that physicians use to check ears. Her otoscope had broken. And that is how he met his wife, Dr. Nancy Roizen, who now works in developmental and rehabilitation pediatrics at the Cleveland Clinic Children's Hospital. After a two-year detour to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Roizen went back to San Francisco for residency training in anesthesia at UCSF. It didn't take long before he was tapped to head cardiovascular anesthesiology at UCSF. And there, he said, he began his "real" work. Failing the patientDuring preoperative interviews "I would ask patients: 'Do you smoke?' And they would usually say 'no,' but when I asked when they stopped, they would say 'this morning.' " That answer, he said, was disturbing because it was an example of medical experts' failure to get the message to patients. Again and again he encountered this phenomenon with patients -- people with high blood pressure who wouldn't take blood pressure medicine, overweight people who couldn't lose weight and people with high cholesterol who ate unwisely. One day when he was doing a preoperative interview with a man named Simon, who was undergoing surgery to treat hardening of the arteries in his legs, "I asked the man his age and he said 49. Then I asked him if he smoked. When he said yes, I told him that he wasn't really 49, he was really 57, because smoking adds eight years to your calendar age," Roizen said. Roizen said he discovered that "age metric" in a study done by Linus Pauling in 1946. Pauling was a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and later a proponent of health benefits of vitamin C. Simon was shocked to hear that his "real" age was 57, because no male member of his family had lived to age 58 and he was just a few weeks short of that birthday. Roizen told Simon that "if you stop smoking for two months you will be one year younger, and if you stop for five months you'll be two years younger and so on." The message hit home. Simon stopped smoking, and today "his calendar age is 68, but his real age is 56," calculates Roizen. Message received -- and deliveredJust as Simon got the message, so did Roizen, who realized that "age is something everyone can understand and relate to." Armed with that "discovery," Roizen carried the message to the University of Chicago, where he became chairman of anesthesiology. He now routinely added his age metric to his preoperative evaluation -- including patient Martin Rom, who was 47 when Roizen first examined him. Roizen told Rom he was really 54, because he had high blood pressure. Rom asked Roizen if he could calculate real age values for other health risks. Roizen said that it could be done but it would require the assistance of several other experts. "To my surprise, he pulled out his checkbook, wrote a check for $25,000 and told me to get an answer in six weeks." Roizen gathered experts from Johns Hopkins, Stanford, the Centers for Disease Control, and the University of Chicago. In 10 weeks they had an answer. That first step led to RealAge Inc., primed with a check from Rom, this time for $50,000. They were soon joined by Charlie Silver -- who had made a fortune in quick oil-change franchises. Roizen, however, also continued to rack up professional honors and he moved from the University of Chicago to Syracuse University, where he served as dean of the medical school. Match made in TV-landWhile he was at Syracuse, heart surgeon Mehmet Oz, a mainstream believer in unorthodox approaches, launched a cable television show. But the show's sponsor suggested that Oz needed a partner, and suggested that Roizen would be the perfect sidekick. Over a lunch meeting in New York, Roizen and Oz decided that together they had a chance to really deliver the healthy living message. Last year, the sales of their "Owner's Manual" book were second -- albeit a distant second -- only to sales of the latest Harry Potter book. Roizen's son, Jeffrey, is studying in a combined M.D./Ph.D. program at Washington University in St. Louis and his daughter is studying for a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology. Life, he said, is good. And time is on his side. 
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