Extremely Hot Weather Can Age You as Much as Smoking

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Two white men in their 60s live hundreds of miles away from each other, one in Arizona and the other in Washington state. They are the same age and have identical socioeconomic backgrounds. They also have similar habits and are in roughly the same physical shape. But the man in Arizona is aging more quickly than the man in Washington — 14 months faster, to be exact. Neither man smokes or drinks. Both exercise regularly. So why is the subject living in the desert Southwest more than a year older at the cellular level than his counterpart in the Pacific Northwest? A study published this week in the journal Science Advances makes the case that extreme heat is aging millions of Americans more quickly than their counterparts in cooler climates. The impact of chronic exposure to high temperatures, researchers found, is equivalent to the effect of habitual smoking on cellular aging. As global average ... Read full article.