DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My RealAge is 29.3. (Link to realage.com removed; see warning below.)

I wish my real age, by which I mean my, err, real age, were only 29.3. I haven’t been that young for about eight years.

The RealAge.com site offers an extensive questionnaire that attempts to calculate a person’s life expectancy based on health and lifestyle choices. Years of “RealAge” are added or subtracted to one’s calendar age based on factors such as smoking, exercise, and diet.

For example, taking antioxidant vitamins like C and E daily is worth one year of RealAge, presumably because vitamin-takers live a bit longer than non-vitamin takers.

Curiously, the “annual family income” question appears to have no bearing on one’s RealAge. I guess they’ve snuck a few marketing-research / customer qualification items into the health questionnaire.

Another quirk of the tool is that there’s no apparent penalty for habitually lying about the state of one’s health. (Really, I drink cod liver oil every day!)

The site provides a personalized plan for improving one’s health, based on the questionnaire responses where one comes up a bit shorter than ideal. There is also a nice set of 12 common-sense tips for living longer, for people who don’t take the time for the full analysis because they’re too stressed out about some damn arbitrary deadline or other, itself worth minus multiple years of one’s life.

Warning! On December 3, 2004, I began receiving multiple spam emails per day to the email address I submitted to RealAge. The evidence suggests that RealAge sold or rented its mailing list to bulk-mail-house asandox.com. I can no longer promote nor recommend RealAge’s service. It’s possible, but unlikely, that I knowingly opted in to any sort of promotional program; the sudden appearance of unsolicited marketing materials suggests that RealAge has changed my contact preferences without my consent.