RealAge.com is a site where you answer a long, tedious questionnaire about health habits and disease history and are then told how you’re doing compared to your Calendar Age (CA). Idea being that if your Real Age (RA) is lower than your CA, you’re healthier than the average bear and will live longer too.
According to RealAge.com (recently bought by Hearst Magazines for tens of millions of dollars), my RA is 47.6 (shown at left), a mere nine-tenths of a year younger than my CA. What good is that?
But I stumbled upon another RA calculator produced by a home-page-customization site called Poodwaddle, certainly a confidence-inspiring name. (I couldn’t actually find the Real Age tool on Poodwaddle.com, perhaps because Real Lawyers called them about using a copyrighted name. But you can still take the Poodwaddle widget (at right) for a spin at the inspiringly-named i-am-bored.com.) The Poodwaddle program was more fun than the RA quiz (i.e. shorter), and it involved inputting answers through a sliding button that lets you watch your RA and life expectancy (which should be called your Death Age) spin like some kind of game show result.
The Poodwaddle program said my RA is 37.2, meaning I instantly preferred it to the RealAge.com bid of 47.6. Then I found an “improved” version of the Poodwaddle program on a blog called healthTech.accordingtome.com (yet another winner name). My RA dropped to just 34 (see results at left).
Wasting further work time, I found other people online who were equally happy with the modified RA calculators—a 36-year-old who is actually 17, a 19-year-old who is 10.4, and a 25-year-old who is 5. Somewhere out there in the “real” world is a nine-year-old who is a fetus.
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