Our basic premise is that your body is amazing. No matter what choices you’ve made up until this point, the good news is that you get a do-over: It’s not that hard and it doesn’t take that long. We want you to know how much control you have over your quality and length of life.

Perhaps the best way to explain the dynamics of aging is to take a look at another complex system that’s subjected to the same forces as your body: a city.

Throughout this series of YOU columns appearing in each issue of SUCCESS, you’ll learn many ways to manage your personal metropolis. Consider yourself the mayor, with the power to make all the decisions about what’s best for your biological city. Our goal is to put your body at the top of the “10 best cities to live in” list. It’s to give it the ability to adjust rapidly to changing times—to reinvent itself.

Science has pointed to 14 major processes that drive almost all of the aging we experience. Those causes of aging, everything from wear and tear to neurotransmitter imbalances, indicate the tools you’ll need to get at what you really want: a body that is younger and stronger with more energy than a Labrador puppy.

Genes Are Not an Excuse
We live in a society where making excuses is as easy as making a sandwich. Nowhere is that more apparent than when it comes to our health. The reason why we’re frazzled with stress? Blame the boss. The reason why we’re sick? Blame the sniffling kids. The reason why our societal waistbands are stretching and snapping at an alarming rate? Blame Auntie’s alfredo sauce or those alluring arches.

The top health excuse, however, revolves around the biggest four-letter word of them all: The gene. Blame the genes.

The truth is that we blame our genes for just about everything—for baldness, for fatness, for sickness, for illness and for every other health-related problem we can think of. In our minds, that means that our family tree is on the hook for the ultimate health question of them all: How long—and how well—will we live?

But that’s exactly where most of us have it wrong. While we’re certainly born with genes that help determine everything from our height to our risk for heart disease, the most important fact is this: You get to control your genes.

Your Body, Your City
Let’s go back to our city to see how this works. Every city has its own genetic code, just as you have yours. For a city, genes are geography—whether it’s built on a river or lies directly in a prevalent hurricane path. The city’s geography can’t inherently change. But the city can adapt to that environment, with earthquake-proof construction or a levee system for preventing floods.

The same goes for YOU. Just because you’ve been dealt a genetic hand that predisposes you to heart disease or diabetes or needing pants as large as a parachute doesn’t mean you can’t mitigate the effects of those genes. One of the major things we’ll teach you is that, while you can’t change your genes, you can change whether they are turned on or off, or how you express them.

When it comes to your body, here’s what we know, primarily through studies of identical twins: Your longevity is based one-quarter on your genetics and three-quarters on your behaviors and lifestyle choices.

Genes work by manufacturing proteins, but whether or not a specific gene is turned on or off is largely under your control.

Major Ager
Of all the processes in your body responsible for aging, we’re mainly concerned about what happens to the power lines within your brain. There are protein fragments in your brain that sound like the name of a Star Wars droid—beta-amyloid— and they’re responsible for gunking up your power lines like fallen branches. They’re likely responsible for causing Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s affects the input and output power lines of the hippocampus. Memory starts to fade. Neurofibrillary tangles, insoluble twisted fibers that build up inside neurons, are like power lines getting crossed up and sending energy to the wrong location. These tangles influence intelligence.

In general, genes control how much beta-amyloid you have gunking up your power lines. Some branches may be knocking out those notes from your course in 18th-century history, while others may be causing you to forget to pick up something from the supermarket. But you can alter the amount of gunk and tangles you have weighing down your power lines by altering the expression of one of your genes: the Apo E gene, to be exact.

Apo E protein acts like the power company crew that removes the branches from the power lines after the storm. It sweeps through and removes the beta-amyloid so that your synapses can keep functioning. Whenever we create new synapses to help our brain improve itself, some of this beta-amyloid remains behind, and the Apo E workers clear the gunk to ensure a clean connection.

One group in the union, however, local Apo E4, sabotages the effort to restore power and even gunks up the power lines further. Research shows that an elevated level of the E4 protein is correlated with a higher incidence of Alzheimer’s. Fortunately, there are things you can do to turn down the activity of the E4 gene and allow the rest of the Apo E team to clear your power lines.

Eating turmeric, which is found in Indian foods, seems to reduce expression of the E4 gene (India, by the way, has a relatively low incidence of Alzheimer’s). The daily dose to do this is 17 mg a day— about the amount in a 4-ounce serving or in a teaspoon of low-quality mustard. Exercise has a similar effect. And DHA helps repair the lines—600 mg a day from fish or algae is what we recommend.

If we can learn how the body works, there’s no reason why we can’t live to 100 and beyond—with the vigor of someone half that age (or even younger!). To do it, you will need to learn that aging well is really not about preventing disease; getting rid of heart disease and cancer gains us less than a decade of life. Rather, we need to slow the rate of aging to avoid the frailty that would make longevity less desirable. So start with Indian food or mustard, 30 minutes of walking and 600 mg of DHA today. And read this column religiously.

Michael F. Roizen, M.D., is a professor of internal medicine and anesthesiology, and chief wellness officer and chair of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Mehmet C. Oz, M.D., is a professor and vice chairman of surgery, as well as director of the Cardiovascular Institute and Integrated Medical Center at New York’s Presbyterian-Columbia University.

Roizen and Oz are the authors of the New York Times best-selling YOU series, including their recent release, YOU Staying Young: The Owner’s Manual for Extending Your Warranty (Free Press).