Sing it with me now. “Don’t make your future you hate you.”

This catchy jingle used in a series of NerdWallet commercials lightheartedly informs you of something you really need to take seriously. That how you manage your money in the present moment affects the moments that make up your future.

The same could be sung about what you now do - or don’t do - with regard to your body. That’s a tune I hope you recognize - and maybe even have memorized.

It’s a version of the song medical researchers croon, but theirs, as a result of their ongoing work, keeps adding stanzas.

For instance, it seems as if some young adults may no longer have to worry about what one version of the NerdWallet commercial warns: Of being “totally screwed” by bad money moves that’ll have them working until 102. That’s because young adults are developing cancer quicker than before.

The quicker rate appears to be related to something that to a large extent is under your control, though: your biological age.

Chronological age, as the website for Northwestern University explains, is how long you have existed. Biological age is how old your cells are in comparison to your chronological age.

Since how you conduct your days and what sort of environment you conduct them in affects how your cells age, the two numbers are rarely the same. So the goal of the health conscious becomes not only to keep the latter number lower than the former, but also to keep the gap widening.

Yet for many young adults, an increase in what the medicos call early-onset cancers is keeping that from occurring.

A study published online in 2022 by Cancers, for instance, uncovered a 20.5 percent increase from 1993 to 2019 in cancers in 18 to 49 year olds who reside in a “high-income region” of the United Kingdom. A paper published online in 2023 by BMJ Oncology found early-onset cancers increased by 79.1 percent worldwide from 1990 and 2019 - and that the number of deaths as a result increased by 27.7 percent.

Research done in the United States has found much the same. A bit of it that’s so new it’s yet to be published offers a theory why: accelerated biological aging.

In a paper presented at the yearly American Association for Cancer Research conference about a month ago, researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis examined data of 148,724 individuals housed in the U.K. Biobank database. Using blood samples, they calculated the participants’ biological age and compared that to their chronological age.

Individuals whose biological age was higher than their chronological age were defined as having accelerated aging, a press release put out by the AACR notes. When a comparison was made between those born between 1950 and 1954 and individuals born after 1964, the second group had a 17 percent higher likelihood of accelerated aging.

They were also found to have an increased rate of three cancers. First and foremost, an increased risk in lung cancer - and a 42-percent increased risk at that.

So what’s the takeaway here?

As the spokesperson for the team of researchers, Ruiyi Tian, MPH, a graduate student, explains in the presser, “If validated, our findings suggest that interventions to slow biological aging could be a new avenue for cancer prevention, and screening efforts tailored to younger individuals with signs of accelerated aging could help detect cancers early.”

No matter what your age, there are many ways in which you can slow biological aging. Three of the easiest to manipulate are probably the three most important to manipulate: exercise, diet, and sleep.

Before a quick and general review of how to approach the first two, I’d be remiss not to stress that no two people are metabolically or physically identical. Long story short, that means once you understand the basics behind the better-health trifecta, you need to experiment, experiment, experiment to find what’s ultimately best for you.

When it comes exercise, you can’t go wrong lifting weights 20 to 30 minutes two to three times a week while doing some sort of cardio with the same rate and frequency. While 80 to 90 percent of your cardio can be performed at a moderate intensity - one that allows you to speak but leaves you short of breath - going above that for a bit is key to slowing biological aging.

The area where you’ll probably need to experiment most is diet, but the following plan is a solid starting point. To consume mainly high-quality protein, whole grains and fruits and vegetables while severely limiting processed foods - especially those containing significant amounts of added fats and sugars.

And if doing any or all of this ever gets too daunting, and you begin to think that keeping your biological age lower than your chronological one just isn’t worth it, sing that jingle again and again until the thought goes away. “Don’t make your future you hate you.”