Forget the Apple a Day.

News flash: your grandmother was wrong. An apple a day won't keep the doctor away, but a cup of blueberries every day just might. Blueberries have a combination of two important classes of anti-aging molecules: antioxidants and anti-inflammatories.

Antioxidants help prevent aging by sopping up the free radicals that get constantly released into our cells. Free radicals are things like hydrogen peroxide that get created while are cells are going about their normal processes of keeping our bodies functioning. If you think about what hydrogen peroxide does to a cut on your skin, you can only imagine what it does inside your body, so neutralizing these free radicals is important to prevent damage if you'd like to live to a ripe old age.

A few years ago, there was a lot of hype about a compound found in red wine called resveratrol. It turns out that the phenolic acids in resveratrol are found in all sorts of fruit, particularly berries with a red or blue color, and recent studies suggest that the most effective anti-aging molecules may actually be in blueberries, not grapes. Even more interesting for those of us who spent most of our lives thinking that science was the answer to everything: scientists have tried isolating every compound in the blueberries and giving it in high doses to rodents. The result: eating whole blueberries, just as nature made them is more effective than high doses of any of the constituent chemicals. Once again, the whole is much more than the sum of it's parts.

The end result: if there is some sort of underlying process of aging, a cup of blueberries a day might just buy you a little extra time.