Smart things to get started on now include: skin care, at least SPF and moisturizing, posture - watch out for gluteal amnesia and "cell phone neck," hand/wrist/finger stretching and strain care, eating low-sugar, learning to cook, finding sports/physical activity you can enjoy long-term, taking care of your eyes, follow the 20/20/20 rule, scalp massage to reduce baldness if applicable. Also paperwork: start an organized system that's mirrored and on offline, and get a basic will set up.

Save up with better health and fitness before your 40 and being 40 won't exactly feel like the end of the world. Before 40 is when you should be doing all the things you note.

Is this a thing?

This has to do with the way billing works for healthcare in the US. It's billed as sick care.

And, most doctors have almost no training on things like nutrition. So the impact of that isn't something they can help with.

If I were to suggest self study I would look at a couple things:

1. The Blue Zones. These are areas that researchers have identified where people live longer and thrive for longer. Something like 10x the number of people live past 100. Much lower rates of disease. Looking at how they live. There's a good book on it at https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Zones-Second-Lessons-Longest/dp/....

2. A good book by a dietitian. I like "The Proof Is In The Plants". Despite the author being vegan and the book talking about plants, the book covers meat and dairy along with amounts that are healthy. All of the recommendations include explainations of how this is known. https://www.amazon.com/Proof-Plants-science-plant-based-plan...

The better health habits you can lock in now, the better -- it's only going to get harder from here on out to lay that foundation.

At least that is what you might be able to control.

Multiply that with the fact that alcoholism not only affects the person drinking, but inherited trauma is a really terrible thing. My life expectancy and quality of life have both been severely impacted due to the drinking habits of someone who hasn't even been alive for 20 years. Maybe mild drinking will only impact your person with say: a shittier night sleeping, but a good night's sleep is one of the best things you can do for your health - and isn't even noticable perhaps until you get a few weeks in a row of it, believe me.

It's a fine line for advice, as I don't feel I'm a teetotaler, but being a culture where drinking is seen as "perfectly fine, if under control" is also not exactly the right message. My country (USA) can attribute more than a half a million deaths every year to alcohol abuse. That's not a stat one should ignore.

I actually haven't had a drink all year (and little last year). I've cut out sugary soda as well - which could be even more impactful to my overall health.

As a 40+ year old (that's scary to type), just some observations, given perspective.

The way in which I've noticed most people get themselves in trouble when they didn't start from a position of impoverishment is simply because their response to problems is to, instead of noticing and addressing them, to normalize them and spend their energy making arguments to change nothing. Which is basically baby behavior: "no sleep, no food, no potty, wait why am I crying". Everyone does end up being in "poor health" someday, but it's often a case of how long you want to continue to struggle and preserve what you have, and some people seem to give up when they're, like, 17 years old.

I think Ozempic and other similar drugs that target the hunger/metabolic pathways will be game changers. While they are expensive and inconvenient now, looking at a horizon of decades, you could easily see them becoming widely adopted.

- Healthy food is becoming increasingly expensive and seen as a luxury. The amount of sugar and carbs in the "average" product has been increasing for decades.

- Working hours are becoming less equally distributed. A lot of people work way too much, even in highly skilled jobs like lawyers, medicine interns, game developers, while other work less.

- Worker rights are being rolled back and many working environments are becoming more competitive.

Which is terrible news because that's damn hard to fix without top-down initiatives, the likes of which the US has been allergic to since the '80s (though we didn't used to be).

[EDIT] By "visit" I mean for years, not tourists.

Please, enlighten us as to what we're not aware of. If we're to trust your take more than the article, which at least references research in the field.

However, lifespan is a crude metric. Healthspan is really what we should be targeting. I don't want to live to 150 if 60 of those years are spend miserable in a nursing home hooked up to machines keeping me alive.

“In 2021, an American was expected to live 76.1 years—down 2.8 years from the 2014 peak of 78.9 years. This backslide has erased all life expectancy gains since 1996, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/life-expectancy-is-declini...

For more data check here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr023.pdf

Granted we might reasonably exclude COVID when trying to figure out the trend, but even then it looks at best flat from 2010.

The decrease in life expectancy from 2014-2018 is well before the pandemic. Going forward when say pricing life insurance it’s worth considering pandemics or at minimum the the likely endemic nature of coronavirus variants becoming endemic.

"No", he said, "my generation might, your's is too unfit, too young, to live that long".

Not to take issue with your main point, but, I’d say that _medicine_ is more capable than ever before, but health care systems are struggling to deliver the benefits to growing populations, for lots of reasons like funding and budgets, education and misinformation, or ideology.