Everybody, especially those with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, or arthritis, can benefit from regularly exercising. For younger adults, exercise improves the amount of blood the heart can pump with each beat (stroke volume) and lowers resting heart rate. Exercise helps older adults have better heart and lung function, which can increase endurance and reduce fatigue.

Try these exercises:

• Balance exercises reduce the risk of falling, which is a significant cause of injuries in elderly adults.
• Strength exercises help build muscle mass, which reduces the risk of osteoporosis later in life.
• Endurance exercises help your breathing and heart rates rise, which regularly improves lung and heart health and stamina.
• Stretching keeps your body loose, which allows you to continue doing everyday tasks with minimal aches and pains.

You should eat more foods with a low glycemic index value. The nutrients in these types of food helps keep your bones, muscles, and organs strong for long periods of time. Additionally, reduce the amount of fast food, white bread, and soda that you consume, as these can cause an unhealthy increase in blood sugar.

Try adding these to your diet:

• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Beans
• Low-fat dairy
• Whole-grain bread

Aim for eight hours. A study in Biological Psychiatry found that sleep deprivation heightened inflammatory markers linked to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes, while an American study suggested people who sleep less than five hours a night had an “excess heart age” 5.1 years beyond their real age.

• There was a 65% higher death rate for people who regularly slept less than 5 hours on all nights compared with people who regularly slept 6 to 7 hours per night.
• There was a 25% higher death rate for people who averaged 8 hours or more of sleep on all nights.

Vitamin D is well-known for its positive influence on bone health, which is extremely important, but this new study suggests that Vitamin D may also benefit our epigenetics. The authors studied epigenetic patterns in 1,600 participants and found that people with low Vitamin D in their blood were “biologically older” than people who had adequate levels — also described as age acceleration.

In addition, chromosomes, the structures that organize DNA, appeared younger in people with adequate Vitamin D levels (30-100 ng/mL). Taken together, these results suggest that Vitamin D might help prevent accelerated aging.