Stunning stat: Our environment and lifestyle are about 10 times more important than our genes when it comes to longevity.

• That's the conclusion of researchers who analyzed the data of some 500,000 people for a study published in Nature Medicine today.

🔎 Zoom in: The researchers landed on 25 environmental factors linked to how rapidly we age, The Guardian reports.

• They range from things that happen before we're even born, like whether our mothers smoked, to parts of our adult lives, like whether we live with a partner and household income.
• Study authors found that these factors — taken together — explain about 17% of the variation in people's longevity. At the same time, our genetic predisposition for major diseases explains less than 2% of that variation.

🚬 Between the lines: Of those 25 factors, researchers concluded that smoking, socioeconomic status, physical activity and living conditions had the most impact on aging and risk for premature death.

• "Smoking was associated with 21 diseases; socioeconomic factors such as household income, home ownership and employment status were associated with 19 diseases; and physical activity was associated with 17 diseases," they write.

👀 The big takeaway: Just two of the 25 factors the researchers found — ethnicity and relative height at age 10 (being shorter is a bit better) — aren't at all modifiable.

• But while the other factors can all technically be controlled, many aren't easy to change. They're proxies for wealth and status, like years of education, income and gym use, Bloomberg reports.

The bottom line: It's good news. There's a great deal we can control when it comes to how long we'll stay healthy — from how much sleep we get to how much we move to what we eat.

Our pic du jour comes from reader Dick Stoll. He snapped this shot of Indian Lake in Michigan's Upper Peninsula last summer with his iPhone.

• "No filters or other machinations!" he tells us.