I'm William Brangham and this is Horizons.

Some new secret to living a long life seems to be popping up almost every day.

If you drink that coffee before noon, you get those benefits.

Living there green spaces could add more years to your life.

But what are the most effective ways to really become a superager? And how can you make sure those extra years are healthy ones?

Coming up next.

Welcome to Horizons. For thousands of years, we humans have tried to avoid growing old.

We don't age. We upgrade. Tens of billions of dollars are spent every year on potions and

procedures to make us look younger, feel

younger, and think younger. It is a hugely profitable, but ultimately fruitless hunt for the so-called

fountain of youth. In fact, more than half of us suffer from at least one chronic illness,

and that percentage jumps as we age. Over seven million of us have Alzheimer's disease.

But science has started to zero in on a few intriguing things. There are some proven techniques

we can do to hold off at least a few aspects of aging and disease. And there are some of us,

they're called super-agers, who do this seemingly effortlessly.

They're people who, according to many of the ways we measure aging, are far younger than their

calendar years would indicate, and they don't suffer from the same ailments. We're going to meet

a few of them at the end of this program, but first, we turn to two people

who have spent many years studying and trying to understand the process of aging.

Dr. Eric Topal is a cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

He's also the author of Super Agers, an evidence-based approach to longevity.

And Dr. Sandra Weintraub is a clinical neuropsychologist and professor at Northwestern University's

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