After more than a century of steady, upward climb, US life expectancy hit 78.9 years in 2015. Since then, it’s been mostly downhill. US life expectancy slid to 76.1 years in 2021 at the pandemic’s nadir before inching back up to 78.4 years in 2023 — still well below the 2014 peak and lagging most peer nations.

So where’s the good news? Science is figuring out ways to pump those numbers up again and pointing the way toward living more years — and more healthy years. And this doesn’t require sci-fi, Silicon Valley anti-aging technology like blood swapping, or cellular reprogramming. According to Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the author of the new book Super Agers, there are evidence-based steps you can take right now to help ensure you live a longer, healthier life.

“We’re at a turning point,” Topol told me in an interview this week. “Thanks to advances in the science of aging, we can actually show everything is going in the right direction. We’re making headway.”

Know — and lower — your biological age

It used to be that if you wanted to know how old you are, all you needed was a calendar. But your body’s aging isn’t as simple as turning the pages on a calendar: Depending on who you are and how you live, different parts of your body can age more quickly or slowly than. And it turns out this other kind of aging, biological aging, matters more for your health than the........

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