Same Life, Different Biology: Bettina and Roberto Campolucci Bordi on Food, Stress and Growing Healthier Together

Chef and wellness expert Bettina Campolucci Bordi has spent the past 15 years exploring the relationship between food, health and wellbeing. When GlycanAge gave her an unexpectedly young biological age, her husband Roberto became curious to see what his own result would show. After more than 20 years together – and with many of their habits now closely aligned – comparing the two offered an interesting look at how people can share a life without necessarily sharing the same biology.

Bettina, food has always been a big part of your life, but your own health also changed the way you thought about it. How did that journey begin?

Bettina: Food has always been part of my life. My mum is Bulgarian-Danish, my father is Norwegian, and I grew up between Tanzania and Sweden, so my cooking has always been influenced by different cultures. Both of my grandmothers were fantastic cooks, and travelling has continued to shape the way I cook.

Around 15 years ago, food became much more personal when I was diagnosed with PMOS (formerly known as PCOS) and told I might struggle to have children. It happened around the same time that I started running wellness retreats, and that really changed the way I thought about food, both for myself and my family.

I was vegan for several years and completely gluten-free for around seven, and at the time I felt much better eating that way. But eventually I realised I needed more flexibility, especially as I became more aware of my own digestive sensitivities and travelled more for work.

Food is love, conversation and community, and I didn’t want the way I ate to stop me from experiencing different cultures or trying the food people had made for me.

Today, I describe my diet as plant-forward. I still eat a huge amount of plants, but I also eat fish, occasionally meat and sometimes dairy or cheese. I know my body much better now, and for me, that flexibility has brought much more balance.

You first took GlycanAge several years ago and received a biological age of 20. What brought you back to the test?

Bettina: The first time I took GlycanAge was back in 2021. I came across it, thought it sounded really interesting and contacted the team to ask if I could try it. Then my result came back as 20 - the lowest possible GlycanAge result.

Obviously, I thought, “Wow, amazing.” I was feeling well and there wasn’t anything about the result that made me feel I needed to urgently change what I was doing, so I carried on with my life.

Then Roberto and I went to the Health Optimisation Summit and listened to a presentation by GlycanAge CEO and co-founder Nikolina Lauc. Hearing much more about the science, the research and glycans themselves suddenly made the test resonate with me in a completely different way.

I remember thinking, “I recognise this. I’m sure I’ve done this test.” I went back, found my old result and suddenly thought, “Oh my God, I scored 20. I wonder what it would be now?”

So I tested again and got 21. That was when I thought, “Okay, I must be doing something right.”

Did seeing a biological age of 21 again make you think differently about what might actually be working?

Bettina: Definitely. We live in a world where wellness can become incredibly complicated. There are people doing crazy biohacking routines and 15 different things before they have even started their morning.

There is always something else you can buy, add, track or optimize. My result almost inspired me to go in the opposite direction.

I came back to four really simple pillars: sleep, community, food and movement.

• Movement can simply be going for a walk.
• Sleep can mean putting your phone away before you go to bed.
• Food can mean going back to recipes our grandmothers already knew how to make, eating real food and getting plenty of diversity onto the plate.
• Community can mean sharing meals with people you love and actually taking the time to cook and be together.

You don’t necessarily have to spend enormous amounts of money.

I’ve started calling it “grandmother wisdom.”

For me, it’s about simplifying rather than constantly adding more.

Roberto, what made you decide to take GlycanAge yourself, and how did you feel before seeing your result?

Roberto: It was definitely triggered by the Health Optimisation Summit.

I remembered Bettina doing her first test and getting such a young result. But sitting through the presentation and hearing more about the science, the background and the research made it much more interesting to me.

Then Bettina had the opportunity to test again, and when I had the opportunity to do it too, I thought, “Yes, let’s see.”

I was actually a little concerned about where my result would be.

Bettina and I now have very similar diets and obviously share a lot of the same life, but I know I’m a worrier. Stress was something I was conscious of.

My GlycanAge came back at 37, around nine years younger than my chronological age, so it was still a really positive result.

I also really enjoyed having the consultation afterwards because it gave me much more context around the result rather than leaving me with just one number.

You and Bettina have been together for more than 20 years, but your lifestyles weren’t always as similar as they are today. What were things like when you first met?

Roberto: When I met Bettina, I was living in Marbella and running a restaurant.

I was drinking more alcohol – probably too much – partying a lot, eating restaurant food all the time and not really exercising. At one point, I was over 100 kilos. I definitely wasn’t the healthiest.

Then around 15 years ago, Bettina started working in the retreat industry.

Suddenly, I was around all these conversations about wellness, food, supplements and different approaches to health. I started listening and then started trying things myself.

I tried being vegan for a while. We naturally cut down on a lot of things, and eventually I started going through my own journey and experimenting with what actually suited me.

Today, we follow a very similar overall pattern. We eat a huge diversity of foods, try to eat mostly natural food and have very little processed food.

But I had to find my own way there too.

If we spent an ordinary weekday with you today, what would your shared life actually look like – and where would we start noticing differences?

Bettina: We actually have quite similar habits at the beginning and end of the day.

We nearly always go to bed together unless I’m out at an event, and we’re usually in bed by about 10pm, sometimes even earlier.

My working life has a lot of strings to its bow. I run Bettina’s Kitchen and the Academy alongside consultancy, recipe development, filming, writing, brand work, retreats and events, so there really isn’t a typical week.

One day I might be cooking and recipe testing all day, another I’ll be moving between meetings, filming or teaching, and then suddenly I’ll be on a plane somewhere.

My work is probably about 50/50 between being physically active and sitting behind a screen.

If I’m working from home, Roberto and I will often have breakfast or brunch together, or meet again for lunch, and we nearly always try to have dinner together.

We eat ridiculously early if we can – five or six o’clock is ideal for me.

We both walk a lot, and strength training is the next thing we really want to make more consistent.

Our evenings are pretty low-key. We’ll eat, relax in front of something on television and I’ll quite often have my laptop open doing bits of work at the same time.

One boundary I’ve become much better at is weekends. I take them off properly now because otherwise my work could very easily expand into every hour available.

Roberto: My days are generally much more structured.

I have a watch brand, I’m an author and I also run our creative studio, so I have several different strands to my work too, but I have much more control over my schedule.

I tend to wake up first, do my morning routine, make the coffee and get started on work.

I work largely from home or the studio, so I generally know what my week is going to look like. Bettina has far more external demands on her time – shoots, clients, events, travel and the Academy.

That flexibility is actually really useful for us as a family because there are periods when Bettina is incredibly busy and I can absorb more of what needs doing around her.

Where we really come back together is around food, walking and the end of the day.

We’ve always made a point of having that time together.

You’ve both described Roberto as more of a worrier. How differently do the two of you experience and respond to stress?

Bettina: The things that stress us are quite different.

Roberto is much more likely to worry about uncertainty, the future, the “what ifs” and things that might happen.

My stress is usually much more immediate.

I get overwhelmed when there are too many commitments, too many people needing something from me and I feel like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

I’m much better at letting go of things that are completely outside my control. I’ve always been quite pragmatic about that. If there is genuinely nothing I can do about something, I try not to give it too much mental space.

We also sleep very differently when we’re stressed.

Roberto can fall asleep almost instantly but then wake up in the middle of the night thinking about things.

I’m the opposite. I can struggle to fall asleep if my head is busy, but once I’m asleep I normally sleep through.

Walking and being on my own are probably my best ways of decompressing. I need that space where nobody needs anything from me.

Roberto is very good with breathing practices and uses those much more consciously.

The good thing is that we normally talk things through. If one of us is under pressure, we tend to sit down and untangle it together rather than letting it build.

I think Roberto has learned from me not to spend quite so much energy worrying about things he cannot control. And I’ve learned a huge amount from him about accepting help.

When I have far too much on, he is brilliant at recognising it and simply taking things off my plate before I even have to ask.

Roberto: I probably do think further ahead than Bettina and can get caught up in uncertainty.

Bettina is very good at saying, “Can we actually do anything about this today?” If the answer is no, she is much better at putting it down.

Where I think I can help her is when everything becomes too much at once. Her work has a lot more moving parts, and sometimes she needs someone to look at the whole picture and remove a few things from the list.

We balance each other quite well in that sense.

When you compared your results, what did the differences between them make you think about – and did either of you decide to change anything?

Bettina: I think that’s what made the comparison so interesting. We eat very similarly, live together, walk together and share a lot of the same habits, but our days, stress responses, health histories and bodies are still different.

It reinforced for me that you can’t look at one lifestyle factor and assume it explains everything. Even with my own result, I wouldn’t say, “My GlycanAge is 21 because I eat this particular food.”

For me, the result mostly made me more conscious of stress and sleep. I didn’t feel I needed to change my life completely, but it gave me another layer of awareness – and maybe a slightly competitive desire to keep my result where it is!

Roberto: For me, the result made me think more about cardiovascular health because of my family history of cardiomyopathy.

The consultation was particularly useful because it helped me look at the result in the context of what is relevant to me personally, rather than focusing only on the number.

That’s what I find useful about testing: it gives you something to come back to over time and see whether the things you’re paying attention to are making a difference.

How has sharing more than 20 years of life together influenced the habits you’ve built and the way you look after one another?

Bettina: I think having somebody beside you makes a huge difference, but that doesn’t mean you have to do everything in exactly the same way.

Because of my work, I’m often the one bringing new ideas around food, wellness and longevity into our home, but Roberto introduces things too. We encourage each other to eat well, walk, rest and look after ourselves.

Over the years, we’ve also learned not to expect each other to be in exactly the same place all the time. Sometimes we adopt a habit together, sometimes one of us gets there first, and sometimes we simply need different things.

There’s also something incredibly valuable about having someone who knows you very well. Roberto notices when I’m doing too much before I necessarily admit it, and I know when his mind is getting caught up in things he can’t control.

That, to me, is one of the overlooked benefits of a long partnership: you have somebody beside you who notices.

Roberto: Being together for so long means we’ve naturally influenced one another’s habits without trying to turn each other into the same person.

Bettina has brought a huge amount of knowledge around food and wellness into our lives, but we’ve both learned that health is about more than food or exercise. It’s also about feeling supported, having someone to talk to and knowing when to step in for each other.

After more than 20 years together, Bettina and Roberto now share many of the same habits, but their routines, stress responses, histories and biological results remain their own. What they have built together is perhaps just as interesting as the differences between 21 and 37: a life where they encourage each other to eat well, move, rest and manage stress, while still recognising that they may need different things at different times.