# Exposome

Your exposome is the sum of every environmental exposure you meet from conception to death: chemical, physical, biological, lifestyle, and social. Christopher Wild coined the term in 2005 as the environmental counterpart to the genome. He later split it into three overlapping layers. First, the general external environment: where you live, the climate, your income and status. Second, the specific external environment: diet, exercise, tobacco, job hazards, pollutants. Third, the internal environment: your metabolism, gut microbiome, oxidative stress, inflammation. Measuring all this is hard. It takes wearable sensors, blood and urine markers, maps of where you have been, and multi-omic profiling. The field even has a name: exposomics. The evidence is fairly consistent. A heavy lifetime exposure load speeds up biological aging. It does so through oxidative DNA damage, failing mitochondria, cellular senescence, and faster-ticking epigenetic clocks. One WHO analysis (Pruss-Ustun et al., 2016) blamed roughly 24% of all deaths worldwide on environmental factors you could change. The hard part is proving cause. Thousands of exposures hit you at once and tangle together. So for now the field is strong on links but still building the tools to prove what causes what.

## Sources

- Wild CP. (2005). Complementing the Genome with an 'Exposome': The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-05-0456
- Pandics T, Major D, Fazekas-Pongor V, et al.. (2023). Exposome and unhealthy aging: environmental drivers from air pollution to occupational exposures. GeroScience. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-023-00913-3
- Aliberti SM, Capunzo M. (2025). The Power of Environment: A Comprehensive Review of the Exposome's Role in Healthy Aging, Longevity, and Preventive Medicine—Lessons from Blue Zones and Cilento. Nutrients. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu17040722

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_Canonical: https://longevity-switzerland.com/en/glossary/exposome · Part of Longevity Cities · Updated 2026-06-22_