Cold plunges, orange-tinted glasses, breathwork and biometric tracking — the longevity industry is booming. But do you really need to spend a tech billionaire budget on biohacking gadgets and supplement stacks to live a long and healthy life? Here’s what you need to know about what actually increases longevity.
What is longevity?
Longevity is the ability to live a long, healthy life by maximizing both lifespan (years lived) and healthspan (years lived in good health). Rather than just increasing the number of candles on your birthday cake, the goal is to delay ageing, prevent chronic disease, maintain physical and mental function and maintain your quality of life long-term.
How long are we living right now?
Over the last 100 years, the life expectancy of Australian males has increased from 59.2 to 81.2 years. This extension of life expectancy was due mainly to reductions in infectious diseases (from better sanitation, nutrition, vaccinations), followed by better treatment (new drugs, medical technologies) and prevention (reduced smoking) of chronic disease, and improved safety (seatbelts, workplace practices).
In 1921, half of Australian males died before the age of 67. Now, half of Australian males survive to 84 years of age. Not only are Australian males living longer on average, but there are many more individuals living for longer.
And how well are we living?
More people living for longer means more people developing diseases associated with ageing, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. Coronary heart disease is now the most common cause of death for Australian males. As we understand the causes of these health problems and develop new ways to prevent or treat them, they will probably become less common causes of death. For example, the proportion of Australian males who smoke tobacco has fallen by about two-thirds in the last 30 years and lung cancer is moving down the list of the top causes of death in Australian males.
So what actually increases longevity?
The strongest evidence for how to live a longer life supports fundamental things: don’t smoke, be physically active, eat a high-quality diet, limit alcohol consumption, and sleep well. Social connection is also strongly linked to lower mortality.
We still have some way to go with the things that have already worked at increasing lifespan. More than 12% of the deaths of Australian males are due to tobacco use, around 10% are due to poor diet, 4.6% are attributable to alcohol, and 4% are due to physical inactivity. Addressing each of these risk factors is proven to increase lifespan.
Not only are these interventions proven to increase lifespan, but they’re also proven to affect biological and cellular mechanisms identified by ‘geroscience’ as the mechanisms responsible for ageing.
Geroscience is a focus on the biological mechanisms of ageing, as opposed to ‘gerontology’ or ‘geriatrics’ which is more general. It’s kind of a buzzword for the scientific basis for the idea that targeting individual molecular pathways in cells is the path to longevity.
Mechanisms like insulin-like signalling, target or rapamycin (TOR) peptides, sirtuins, nicotinomide adenine dinuceotide (NAD+), oxidative stress, mitohormesis, cellular senescence, autophagy and inflammation can all benefit from physical activity and a healthy diet.
Healthy eating, physical activity and quality sleep offer improvements in life-long health as well as longer lives, which is great because living into your 100s kind of loses its appeal if you’re stuck spending your final 20 years suffering from chronic disease.
So what about the snake oil?
There are plenty of products and protocols promising longevity, many of which come with a hefty price tag and little evidence. For example, drugs (including supplements and peptides) slated to target the mechanisms responsible for aging are experimental and might not work as well in humans as they do in laboratory animals like worms, flies and mice. They also come with risks to your health. Doses and ingredients could be different to what’s on the label, and it could be contaminated. At best, these drugs could be a waste of money. At worst, they could be doing damage that we won’t know about for years to come.
And if we optimise nutrition and exercise (which has plenty of beneficial evidence) tinkering with individual cellular mechanisms might not result in much of an increase in lifespan.
Same goes for other popular longevity fads sold as life-extension shortcuts like replicating blue-zone habits, telomere-boosting supplements, extreme fasting and whole-body-MRIs. They lack strong human trial evidence for actually extending lifespan.
There are no proven short-cuts to a long and healthy life, so the earlier you start the better.
What to prioritise first
If you want the biggest return on effort, start here:
Tim Moss
Healthy Male Health Content Manager
Dr Tim Moss has PhD in physiology and more than 20 years’ experience as a biomedical research scientist. Tim stepped away from his successful academic career at the end of 2019, to apply his skills in turning complicated scientific and medical knowledge into information that all people can use to improve their health and wellbeing. Tim has written for crikey.com and Scientific American’s Observations blog, which is far more interesting than his authorship of over 150 academic publications. He has studied science communication at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science in New York, and at the Department of Biological Engineering Communication Lab at MIT in Boston.
