Disclaimer: this article is NOT personalized medical advice and I hold no responsibility for what you do to your body. I give no individual medical advice. Schedule a visit with your physician for that.

I realized at a relatively young age that the medical industry has little interest in keeping me well, but rather focuses on identifying and treating malady after it occurs, whereas I've set out (as I think all people should) to avoid malady wherever possible. As I studied and practice engineering, I study and apply that view to my own body as a system. I've personally successfully treated a few symptoms in my own life, and as far as they report, at this point people perceive me to be younger than I am. I offer below a few tips on not growing any older than you must, based on about 10 years of thought and study of the subject.

Arrange your life to include ambient exercise as a daily practice

For example, take more than one stair step at a time. Most are capable of taking at least 2 steps at a time,[1] it may be difficult at first, you may have to strain against your body's limitations, you may even have to do some lunges or squats to develop the strength necessary to do it, but doing so will pay many dividends, as most people will face many more staircases than treadmills in their lives, and climbing more than one step at a time exercises a greater range of motion at less mechanical advantage than a single step. Among other benefits, this will help you maintain more strength than strictly necessary to make it through your daily life, so as to maintain greater mobility for longer when your muscles naturally decline with age. In addition, incidental exercise like this will benefit your cardiovascular system, and your metabolism. Quite a lot of benefit from such a simple change.

This is an example of what I call ambient exercise, and IMO there is no better exercise - it gets you where you are going anyway, but often faster, and with more benefit, at the same time it gets you exercise without dedicated time. Other examples include cycling for transport, and favoring stairs even when escalators or elevators are available. Even walking quickly has significant health benefits over walking slowly.

Pay attention to habits that have cumulative health effects

In risk, it's the things you do daily that will someday go sideways and kill you, and in aging, it's the damage that you accumulate daily that will wear you out. Wear protection from the sun, particularly to protect your face and neck, wear sunglasses to protect your eyes. Being aware of the UV Index can guide when these interventions are most important. Personally I recently switched from a ball-cap to what I call my "adventure hat" for daily life.

If you drink alcohol regularly or enthusiastically, consider cutting down and taking NAC when drinking as a countermeasure. Consider wearing earplugs in loud environments and plugging your ears in the presence of sirens.

For the same reason start your health practices early, before problems manifest, and you’ll reduce the aggregate damage your body sustains over time, thus keeping yourself safer, healthier, and living longer for it. Far better to protect your hearing before it’s noticeably lost. Far easier to avoid injury than recover from it.

But you don't have to take my word for it:

“when it comes to age-related diseases, the medical technologies of the past few decades are just not all that good. Treatments have failed to address the causes of aging, and instead took on the impossible task of trying patch over the consequences in a failing system. The result, with very few exceptions, such as treatments to control blood pressure and blood cholesterol, is therapies offering only marginal, unreliable benefits and little impact to mortality. It remains the case that in the matter of aging, maintaining fitness and slimness is more reliable or even more effective than most of what has been offered by medical science over recent decades.”
— source

Pay attention to the signs of age and do what you can to address their causes

As where there is smoke, there is fire, and to whatever extent possible, it’s important to identify the cause and put that fire out. For example, research has uncovered that gray hair is a consequence of buildup of Hydrogen Peroxide, which bleaches the hair follicle. Hydrogen Peroxide is an example of a harmful Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) that is produced continuously by your metabolic processes, and should be naturally dispatched by your body before building up, if your body is functioning as well as it should. While dyeing your hair will conceal the evidence, treating the cause will prevent those same ROS from wreaking other havoc: DNA damage, etc.

But can you help your body dispatch with it? Chemically, there are at least two important antioxidants which reduce it, which are Catalase and Glutathione Peroxidase. Catalase is abundant in wheatgrass, so I take wheatgrass powder in a shake from time to time. Another important element is Superoxide Dismutase (SOD) - if Hydrogen Peroxide is Water + Oxygen, Superoxide is Hydrogen Peroxide + Oxygen, and Superoxide Dismutase reduces it to Hydrogen Peroxide. This combo, of Catalase and Superoxide Dismutase, if it could be applied simultaneously throughout your body, would reduce these two ROS to just water and oxygen.

Support your body’s own restoration and maintenance pathways

A big shift in my understanding of health came with the awareness that your body generates cancerous cells all the time - it’s just that for almost everyone, almost all of the time, inbuilt protections cause the cell to shut down, or the immune system effectively dispatches them. So cancer can be viewed not so much as a specific dysfunction in the cell cycle, but rather a systemic immune failure. This indicates it may be much more helpful to support your own body’s intricate, long-evolved system for protecting itself than to try to do its job for it after it has failed.[2]

For example, not directly related to cancer, your body has its own inborn mechanisms for maintaining and repairing itself on the cellular level. One such category of these is called the Sirtuin pathways. The 7 Sirtuin pathways have been shown to play important roles in aging, metabolic function, and more. For example, just one of these, SIRT3, has been shown to:

• Support energy production
• Prevent cardiac hypertrophy
• Prevent Parkinson’s disease
• Support insulin sensitivity
• Support cell survival
• Suppress tumors
• Prevent DNA damage
• Prevent noise-induced hearing loss

Much of the above is a consequence of SIRT3's effects in producing countermeasures to the ROS mentioned above, as illustrated here:

The trick with the Sirtuins is that they are powered by an energetic molecule call NAD+, and NAD+ declines with age. So, as with avoiding cancer by boosting your immune system, you reduce the acceleration of aging that occurs over time by boosting your own body's ability to restore and maintain itself. Personally I take NMN, the direct precursor to NAD+, sublingually. As with all anti-aging mechanisms, it's difficult to assign direct effect to any given intervention, but this one has given me the most significant subjective benefit, both in terms of energy level, and notably in terms of skin quality (I saw a significant subjecting improvement within the first month or two of use).

Conclusion

There's certainly much more to be said and considered, given that the body is enormously complex and complicated, but the high-level points cover much of what I judge to matter. Will be happy to hear questions, critiques, theories, or queries on any of the above.

Take care, and be well.