Dan DeBaun, founder of the largest authorized Berkey dealer in the US, on why longevity needs to treat subtraction as seriously as addition.
Walk into any longevity conference and you will hear about what to add. Supplements, peptides, NAD, metformin, cold plunges, wearables that grade your sleep. The whole culture is built around inputs, the things you can buy and take. Far less attention goes to the other half of the equation, which is what your body is taking in without your consent.
Scientists call the sum of those lifelong environmental exposures the exposome. It covers the water you drink, the air you breathe, the dust in your house, and the chemicals that migrate out of the products around you. The Environmental Working Group estimates that more than 200 million Americans may have PFAS, a family of persistent industrial chemicals, in their drinking water. That is not a fringe exposure. That is most of the country.
What the data is starting to show
The science linking these exposures to aging is young, but it is getting harder to wave away. A February 2026 study in Frontiers in Aging examined older US adults and found that higher blood levels of two PFAS compounds, PFNA and PFSA, were associated with accelerated epigenetic aging, the kind measured by DNA methylation clocks. The effect was strongest in men and in adults aged 50 to 64. A separate 2024 analysis in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, drawing on nearly 15,000 adults, found that higher PFAS exposure was associated with faster biological aging, and pointed to C-reactive protein, a standard marker of inflammation, as a likely link in the chain.
I want to be careful here, because this field has been burned by overclaiming before. These are associations, not proof. Both studies are cross-sectional, and the authors say so themselves. Nobody has shown that PFAS cause faster aging, and nobody has shown that filtering your water adds a single year to your life. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The blind spot
But here is what bothers me. Inflammation is already central to how this field thinks about aging. We measure it, score it, and build interventions around it. Yet the environmental load that may be feeding it sits almost entirely outside the conversation. People will spend three hundred dollars a month on supplements to nudge a biomarker and never once test the tap that fills the glass they take them with.
I think the reason is simple. Addition sells. There is a product, a protocol, a subscription, a number that goes up. Subtraction is unglamorous. Reducing an exposure does not come with a dashboard or a monthly box, and it does not photograph well. So a field that prides itself on rigor has a real blind spot, and it is shaped almost exactly like the things that are hardest to monetize.
What the field should do
If we are serious about biological age, we should treat exposure reduction as a first-class intervention, studied and measured with the same intensity we give the newest molecule. That means longitudinal work that tracks what actually happens when exposure drops. It means environmental load showing up in the same reports as the sleep score and the lipid panel.
It also means raising the bar on the products people already buy to reduce exposure. I sell water filter elements for a living, so I will say this with some authority: the consumer side of this category is full of claims that would not survive a serious look. If you are going to act on the exposome, demand evidence. Specifically:
- Testing done by an independent, accredited laboratory, not numbers generated
in-house by the company selling the product. - Testing run to recognized methods such as NSF and ANSI standards, rather than a vague percentage on a label.
- Long-term capacity data, because how a filter element performs when it is new tells you almost nothing about month ten.
- Claims tied to specific, named compounds at stated levels, not blanket reassurance.
None of this is as exciting as a new peptide, and none of it will trend. But longevity will not grow up until it takes subtraction as seriously as it takes addition. The exposome is real, it is measurable, the inflammation link is biologically plausible, and the testing standards we need already exist. The field simply has to decide that what we remove from a life matters as much as what we add to it. My bet is that a meaningful share of the next decade’s healthspan gains is hiding in exactly that unglamorous place.
About Dan DeBaun
Dan DeBaun is the founder of BigBerkeyWaterFilters.com, the largest authorized Berkey dealer in the United States. He has spent 18 years in the gravity water filtration business and writes about water quality, environmental exposure, and consumer testing standards. He holds an engineering degree from Rutgers University and an MBA.
