You don’t need to be a physician to understand that the food you eat is directly implicated in how you feel. Whether in the short term (feeling bloated after eating a rich and heavy, late-night meal) or the longer term (too much ultra-processed food leading to an obesity problem and chronic illness), you’re likely aware of how your diet has had a direct impact on your health as you get older. Diet is just one of the “lifestyle” factors being recognized as an area where behavioral change could really improve your health and alter the path of your aging experience. While genetics plays a role, it’s really your daily behaviors (diet, physical activity, sleep, stress, and relationships) that have the biggest influence on your health, your health span, and your life span. In fact, more and more, physicians and their patients are recognizing that lifestyle medicine and functional medicine offer a lot of benefits in comparison to the traditional medical approach of diagnosing and treating disease and chronic conditions, often leading to the use of medications or surgical interventions. The changes you can make yourself may be the biggest factors in how healthy you remain as you get older.

For example, there is now a movement afoot among policymakers to recognize that “food is medicine” and to even go so far as to allow physicians to “prescribe” certain diets, or ensure funds are available to purchase healthier foods, as a way to improve your health and well-being. Some Medicaid and Medicare Advantage programs will now financially support either medically tailored meals for particular medical conditions, the purchase of certain groceries to address specific medical conditions or even vouchers for purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables (known as produce prescriptions). While these programs are in pilot stages and more data and evidence need to be produced to lure bigger insurance programs into supporting them there’s no doubt that the pendulum is swinging in favor of food rather than the “pharmacy” as a way to address many chronic conditions, reduce health care costs and improve well-being, especially for those who lack the funds to purchase healthy foods.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of mounting evidence of not only what you should be eating but also what you should be eliminating from your diet in order to improve your health and extend your health span (and likely your life span). So, for example, just this past week we have new research implicating the role of fructose in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Foods with added sugars containing fructose and glucose, such as table sugar and high fructose corn syrup may work to flip a “survival switch” in your body, with a set of chain reactions raising the risk for the development of Alzheimer’s. We already know the harms that sugar ingestion may cause in your body and, in fact, Dr. Mark Hyman, one of the most vocal proponents of a functional medicine approach to health, recently spoke about the tremendous damage done to your body because of sugar (as well as how easy it is to overload your body with added sugars given that 4 grams of sugar equal one teaspoon of sugar). Dr. Hyman just published a new book titled Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life that dives deep into examining the lifestyle factors, including diet, that are within your control to put you on a path of healthier aging. So, you can wait for a prescription or a pill- or you can take some preventive action to alter behaviors within your control and steer yourself toward a healthier tomorrow.